Buildig Automation Servers with ATL.pptVIP

Building Automation Servers with ATL Steve Zimmerman Session Objectives Discuss Automation goals and characteristics Review implementation details Show how ATL helps Investigate ATL + MFC = Automation Make recommendations What is Automation? The “Book” Answer: “A COM-based technology that allows software packages to expose their unique features to scripting tools and other applications” The “Real” Answer: “How can we drive the MS Office apps from within Visual Basic?” De facto Characteristics COM atop standalone EXE Objects map to User-Interface elements Chart, Window, Document, Cell Deeply-hierarchical object model Collections Methods, properties, and events Automation Goals Prefer client-side simplicity over sophistication and type-safety Simple data types Automatic type conversion Optional arguments Default methods Support interpreted languages Provide self-documenting header Don’t require compilation Implementation Details Variant, BSTR, SAFEARRAY IDispatch Dual interfaces Enumerators Recall: BSTR De facto standard COM string Length-prefixed, null-terminated array of OLECHARs Pointer to start of string, not start of memory block Requires ::SysXXXX functions Recall: VARIANT Mother of all types Weakly typed Automatic data conversions Implemented as discriminated union struct __tagVARIANT { VARTYPE vt; WORD wReserved1, wReserved2, wReserved3; DWORD MegaUnion }; CComBSTR Lets you treat BSTR as regular class Calls to SysXXXX handled internally Use in place of BSTR for [in], [out] Not a substitute for STL wstring! CComBSTR Methods CComBSTR Usage CComBSTR Omissions No LPCSTR extraction! Use _bstr_t for that No string manipulation No Insert, Find, Mid, Left, Right, etc. Use wstring for that No language-sensitive collation Byte-by-byte comparison only CComBSTR Gotchas Freeing BSTR explicitly Using CComBSTR as [out] Right-side assignment: CComVariant Derived from VARIANT Recall: IDispatch An indirect, legacy mechanism for exposing functionalit