VA Smalltalk Procedure Dialog parts, which are available with each communication protocol that VA Smalltalk supports, can provide a way for your application to communicate with program logic on a remote machine.

A procedure dialog is a simple communications transaction that follows a predefined sequence of steps:

If your client and server applications are designed to follow this sequence, you can use a VA Smalltalk procedure dialog part to perform your communications functions.

A procedure dialog communicates with the server program logic through a record, which is a formatted chunk of data that is both passed to and received from the server. When a VA Smalltalk application runs the procedure dialog, it passes to it a single record, which can contain both input and output fields. When the function completes, the output fields are filled in with the function's result values.

To a VA Smalltalk application, the procedure dialog parts behave similar to the C and COBOL External Function parts, which are used to access functions residing in local DLLs. However, it is important to note that, unlike the different external function parts, the procedure dialog parts do not support passing of multiple records. All of the necessary input and output fields must be contained within a single record.