Communicating between LabVIEW and my own application

[LiVi]

Hi, I want to design a way for my application to send and receive commands to/from LabVIEW. It is important that this is quite easy for the LV user to accomplish this.

The way I thought of was the following:

* Make my application an ActiveX Server.

* Provide a sendCommand(...) to use when sending messages from LV to my application.

* Provide an onReceivedCommand(...) callback event to use when sending messages from my application to LV.

* Encapsulate this in a special subVI so that the LV user does not have to do all the ActiveX things etc...

I have also realised this solution by using the ActiveX interface of MS Word to send commands and receive callbacks.

However I am beginning to doupt this solution partly because i can't come up with a reasonable interface to my subVI, should I provide it with Notifiers? and partly because I am beginning to think it must be a simpler way to do this. It would also be better if it was my application that could open LV instead of the opposite.

The optimal thing would be if the LV user just added my subVI to his VI and used two ports on it to send and receive messages and did not have to worry about anything else. Then when I execute my LV could be started, my VI loaded and run and while running my application and LV would mommunicate through the subVI ports!

Is this possible to achive? What kind of design do you propose? I have only used LV for about a week, so I would appreciate a detailed description.

Thank you very much in advance!