Get notified that MS Excel file is no longer used in Progress 4GL (ABL)

Question

There is a GUI ADM2 Progress v9 application using AppServer.

It needs to give users an ability to view MS Excel files stored on the AppServer. So far it:

1. Pulls .xls file from AppServer to a local drive.
2. Fires up a copy of MS Excel and opens the file.

The problem is that the temporary file on the local drive needs to be removed once it's no longer required. Any hints?

Answer 1

If you are "firing up a copy of Excel", is there any special reason you can't just point that "fired-up" Excel application at the file on your App Server?
If you are starting Excel from a command-line shell, you could just go Excel.exe "http://myserver/myexcelbook.xls" right?

If you are opening it via something like Office Interop Assemblies, then you can key off of the Application.WorkBookBeforeClose event like

ThisMethodHandlesTheWorkbookBeforeCloseEvent()
{
  DeleteTheFile();
}

Answer 2

You can run Excel using the os-command function in Progress and tell it to wait until you're done viewing to come back to the progress code. Once you're out of Excel run the os-delete command against the file.