COM Compliance

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by Wilfred Verkley >> Tue, 1 Jun 1999 8:44:25 GMT

I notice the latest Discover Magazine says that Jade 5 will have "COM Compliance". Does that mean external applications written in languages like VB, C++, or Delphi can now access a Jade Database through COM objects? Will each object have its own COM interface or will the interface be at a lower level?

This would be very welcome feature as its still quite difficult at the moment for an external program to talk directly to a Jade database/application.

Thanks,

Wilfred Verkley.

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by James Plank >> Tue, 1 Jun 1999 21:56:29 GMT

Im new to jade and need Ole automation to control other apps via Jade (ie word, excel etc), as far as I can see this isnt available as yet. Does COM also mean we get this functionality??

James Plank

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by Geoff McIlraith >> Tue, 8 Jun 1999 0:36:28 GMT

For simple interactions with Ole documents, you can use the JADE OleControl.

For more powerful interactions, an approach I've seen used is to write yourself an ActiveX control that provides the required interface to the other application.

With JADE 5's new ActiveX Exposure feature, it may be possible to do some of the work using the scripting language of the other application (eg: VB Script) to interact with exposed JADE objects. As an extension to this idea, you could set up a JADE object that you subscribe to notifications on from your external application, each notification being a trigger for you to do something in the external application's scripting language.

Work is still going on to improve JADE's ActiveX capability. Obviously, no commitments can be made for post JADE 5 functionality, until all the options a weighed etc, but I expect that in some release post JADE 5, the ability to interact with the COM object models of external applications (such as Word, Outlook, Excel) will be a feature of JADE.

Cheers, Geoff

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by Geoff McIlraith >> Tue, 8 Jun 1999 0:04:38 GMT

Does that mean external applications written in languages like VB, C++, or Delphi can now access a Jade Database through COM objects?

You will have access to JADE objects through COM objects.

Will each object have its own COM interface or will the interface be at a lower level?

Each object will have its own ActiveX interface. The interface will be the COM equivalent of the JADE methods and properties you chose to expose (the implementation then converts the parameters to JADE data types, and calls sendMessage, but you'd never know).

More details:
JADE 5 will support the exposure of JADE objects through the generation of an ActiveX server DLL. The generation process is very straight-forward with wizards being employed to do the work for you - You don't have to write any code.

Once the ActiveX server has been generated, it can be added to the list of references in VB, (or the equivalent for C++ and Delphi) and the classes become available for interaction in this environment.

A couple of technical notes:

The DLL may be statically bound, which gives if better performance than dynamic binding. This does mean that when changes are made to the definitions of the exposed JADE classes, the DLL needs to be re-generated (because the interface will have changed). For this reason, it is best to have your JADE class interfaces stable before exposing through ActiveX.

The generation of the DLL requires the use of Microsoft's Visual C++ version 6, so this needs to be available to the developer wanting to expose ActiveX interfaces (not required in order to use the DLL though).

Hope this helps,
Geoff

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by Wilfred Verkley >> Tue, 8 Jun 1999 1:58:12 GMT

So this feature will work like a C++ code generation wizard, where the C++ code will make JOM calls and expose them as COM objects for any language to use?

Looks really good.

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by Geoff McIlraith >> Wed, 9 Jun 1999 4:58:02 GMT

So this feature will work like a C++ code generation wizard, where the C++ code will make JOM calls and expose them as COM objects for any language to use?

Exactly.

Looks really good.

Ta )

Geoff.