About URL Monikers

  • Article

A moniker is a COM object that identifies an object and provides services to allow other components to obtain a pointer to that object. The system-provided moniker class supports asynchronous binding to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

  • About URLs and Namespaces
  • About Monikers
  • URL Security Zones

About URLs and Namespaces

A URL follows the syntax described in RFC 1738, which specifies a protocol scheme followed by a scheme-specific portion (<scheme><scheme-specific portion>). For example, in the URL https://www.microsoft.com/, "http" is the scheme and "//www.microsoft.com/" is the scheme-specific portion.

The beginning part of the scheme-specific portion of the URL contains the server name. This portion of the URL is often referred to as the URL namespace.

About Monikers

Monikers connect to and activate objects, whether they are in the same machine or across a network. For example COM uses monikers to establish a network connection. They are also used to identify, connect to, and run OLE compound document link objects. In this case, the link source acts as the moniker provider and the container holding the link object acts as the moniker client.

Monikers are used as the basis for linking in OLE. After a moniker is bound to an object, the moniker's IMoniker interface can be used to locate, activate, and access the bound object without having any other specific information on where the actual object is located. The COM moniker architecture provides a convenient programming model for working with URLs. The moniker architecture supports extensible and complete name parsing, as well as printable names. Because URLs frequently refer to resources across high-latency networks, binding a moniker to a URL synchronously impacts performance. This is because the process has to wait for responses from the network before completing the binding. For this reason, the URL moniker class supports asynchronous as well as synchronous binding. For more information, see Creating and Using URL Monikers.

URL Security Zones

A URL security zone is a group of URL namespaces that are assigned an equal level of permission or trust. Each URL action for the zone has an appropriate URL policy assigned to it that reflects the level of trust given to the URL namespaces in that zone. The URL security zones API allows developers to manage URL security zones and create custom URL security zone managers. For more information, see About URL Security Zones.