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Accessing ActiveX Objects

  • Article

To access exposed objects, you can create ActiveX clients using Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual C++, Microsoft Excel, and other applications and programming languages that support the Automation technology. This section discusses several strategies for accessing exposed objects.

  • Creating scripts with Visual Basic

  • Creating controllers that manipulate objects

  • Creating type information browsers

Regardless of your strategy, an ActiveX client needs to follow these steps:

To initialize and create the object

  1. Initialize OLE.

  2. Create an instance of the exposed object.

To manipulate methods and properties

  1. Get information about the object's methods and properties.

  2. Invoke the methods and properties.

To release OLE when the application or programming tool terminates

  1. Revoke the active object.

  2. Uninitialize OLE.

Note

Throughout this section, the file names of sample applications appear in parentheses before the sample code.

In this section

Topic Description
Creating Scripts Using Visual Basic
 Visual Basic provides a complete programming environment for creating Windows applications with which you can manipulate the exposed ActiveX objects of other applications.
Creating Applications and Tools that Access Objects
 Automation provides interfaces for accessing exposed objects from an application or programming tool written in C or C++.
Creating Type Information Browsers
 Type information browsers let users scan type libraries to determine what types of objects are available.

Automation Programming Reference