Hooking Visual - Usability

jcollins

We use Visual as our main database for customer orders, purchase orders, work orders, engineering, inventory and financials. We have bolted on to visual some custom written applications to harness information about orders and inventory that visual lacks the capability to handle for us. Surrounding this information we want to make it easier from a development standpoint to not have to recreate reports and summary screens within these applications to show some information from visual. Is there a way to lunch Customer Order Entry and populate an order id automatically from another application without having to hook the user interface in the visual module and auto populate this feild. Is there commands to say if I know the path of the executable can I load part maintance with part number automatically by calling these executable and passing a part number as a variable?

What is my solution to achieve this?