You can import data into ABL from a process or pipe data from ABL to another process using one of the following statements:

  • INPUT THROUGH statement to import data into ABL from another process.
  • OUTPUT THROUGH statement to pipe data from ABL to another process.
  • INPUT–OUTPUT THROUGH statement to pipe the output of a process into an OpenEdge procedure and to pipe data from OpenEdge back to that same process.

    This allows two-way communication to a program written in C or any other language. You might use this capability to do specialized calculations on data stored in an OpenEdge database or entered during an OpenEdge session.

For more information on these statements, see ABL Reference.