Forum OpenACS Q&A: How do you call a procedure from a different tcl file

This is basic TCL programming and I can do this outside of OpenACS, but I cannot find documents or examples of how to call a procedure from one tcl file to another tcl file.

Example: There two tcl files
1. main.tcl
2. helloworld.tcl
within "helloworld.tcl" is the procedure "hello word"

Within main.tcl, I would like to call (invoke) "hello world" procedure

I tried using the source command, but this do not work.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Dear Tyge,

since your question is about plain Tcl, it is probably better to ask this question on e.g. comp.lang.tcl.

A short answer is that if you want to call a proc from a script, the proc has to be defined first. One can load procs defined in a script by sourcing it [1] or by defining packages [2].

In the OpenACS-case, the API is preloaded from all the library files into a "blueprint" (containing all procs), which is made available to the requests and background jobs.

[1] https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/Tcl30.html
[2] https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/Tcl31.html