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by JADE News Administrator >> Thu, 29 Oct 1998 1:05:26 GMT

Does anyone have any knowledge of these beasts (are there tools available to interrogate a COM interface for function signatures, what initialisation has to be performed before accessing them, etc.), or even better, has anyone interfaced Jade to a COM object?

by JADE News Administrator >> Thu, 29 Oct 1998 1:06:00 GMT

Rob,

You can use the MickeySoft Ole - Com object Viewer which is one of the tools in the platform SDK (or Visual Studio etc.). This tool allows you to view all registered COM interfaces, view type information which includes methods, properties, constant enumarations and embedded help etc.

Note: JADE does not currently support importing all categories of COM objects; One restriction is that it must be a control (not all COM objects are instantiated as controls). If the COM object is not shown in the import Active-X control dialog from painter then it is not directly supported by JADE. One way around the JADE restrictions is to build an Active-X wrapper control which imports the COM object, exports a JADE friendly interface and delegates the operations to the aggregate object.

by JADE News Administrator >> Thu, 29 Oct 1998 1:06:32 GMT

As an addendum to the original question about analysisng COM interfaces: If my understanding of what I was shown at a recent Rational Rose 98 seminar is correct, this latest version allows you to simply drag and drop a COM object from Windows Explorer onto Rose whereupon it will create a component diagram showing all the interfaces (in what they described as a "lollipop diagram"). This facility appeared to work with any exe, dll, etc. that had been created as a COM object. However, I have yet to try it myself.
Kevin L