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Network Send and Receive

Chapter 12-6
Network Send and Receive

The C API provides network send and receive routines that give API programs the ability to connect over a COM port to a remote system and exchange data in character mode with that system. They allow an application to connect to a foreign system and use its own protocol to communicate with that system.

These routines provide two advantages over using the operating system COM driver directly:

  • They allow the application to share the same COM devices being used by Domino or Notes.
  • They allow the application to take advantage of the modem support built into Domino and Notes.



An application should use these routines in the following sequence:

  1. Call NetLink to dial out to the remote system and establish a session to use to communicate with that system.
  2. Call NetSetSessionMode to set the operating parameters for the session.
  3. Call NetSend and NetReceive to communicate over the session in a manner required by the protocol being implemented by the application.
  4. Call NetCloseSession to hang up the phone, release the COM device, and close the session. This is an important step and should never be omitted once a call to NetLink returns successfully, even if any subsequent calls to any of the other routines fail.