You can do this by using a communication pipe from your host, and by organizing your custom command code carefully.

In your host environment, configure a special communication pipe for transfers of the initialization data, in the usual way. After opening the host side of the connection, copy in the desired initialization data.

On the DAPL side, the DAPL configuration script routes the special initialization data pipe to the custom command task. It is very common to place a START command at the end of the configuration script, to run everything as soon as possible. Here, you only want enough processing to run so that the initialization data can be received, so provide a START command that names the PDEFINE section containing the task that you need to initialize.

Within your custom command coding, the order of initializing things matters. You need to have the communication channel fully functioning so that initialization data can pass, but you don't want other things to get in the way. The DAPL system can open connections to things that exist: pre-existing communications pipes, shared variables and suchlike. But the DAPL system cannot open a connection to an input sampling channel pipe that does not exist; it won't exist until a sampling configuration is selected and started. If a pipe_open operation cannot be completed, the task will wait at that point. Normally, such delays are harmless, but this is not a good idea if it locks out the processing for your initialization data.

As a practical matter, there are only certain parameters where an input channel pipe could sensibly be used. Defer opening these connections for a while. Instead, opened the connection to the special communications pipe for initialization data first. Immediately allocate your bulk memory storage buffers and proceed to invoke fgets() or pbuf_get() operations to buffer the data sent by the host system.

Then continue with the rest of the initializations. Eventually you will reach the place where no more progress can be made without setting up the connections to your input data stream. So open it. This is a good place for your task to wait until everything else starts to run. The operation will finish after your host application sends another START command, listing all of the rest of the input, output, and processing procedures to run.