External commands

External commands let you set up external programs that you want to run.
Ordinarily this feature's used so you can use your own programs to perform some sort of processing on Friday's FAQ text files or answer HTML files, but you can use Externals for any other purpose if you like.

You can define up to three externals by putting entries in the FRIDAY.FQA file for your FAQ.

Externals appear as buttons on the Advanced Settings dialog.
You define Externals by creating a new section for each in FRIDAY.FQA, named

[External1]
[External2]
[External3]

For example:

[External1]
; Full path to the program you want to run
FullPathToExe=c:\program files\app_folder\app_name.exe
; Caption for button
ButtonText=Run APP_Name
; Parm1-5 are passed as command line parameters to the program 
; after doing substitutions as explained below
Parm1=
Parm2=
Parm3=
Parm4=
Parm5=

The special names are as follows:

Note that all paths are terminated with a backslash.

So suppose you had a program called PRINT that prints from the command line and you want to print all the HTML files in your FAQ:

[External2]
FullPathToExe=c:\program files\Print\PRINT.EXE
ButtonText=Print HTML files
Parm1=HTMLDir*.htm
Parm2=
Parm3=
Parm4=
Parm5=

This would create a new "Print HTML files" button on the Advanced Settings dialog box. When you click the button it would be the equivalent of typing this at the command prompt:

c:\program files\Print\PRINT.EXE c:\yourFAQ_folder\HTML\*.htm

When it's not working right ...
Add this to the [APP] section to have Friday pause and display the external command it's about to execute before it actually runs it. This is handy for debugging purposes.

DebugExternals=1

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