Automation in Delphi COM Programming

In the past three chapters, I've spent a lot of time discussing interfaces and how to create COM objects. I also introduced you to type libraries in Chapter 3, "Type Libraries." This chapter is where everything comes together. If you've been feeling a little disheartened about COM up until now, this is where that will change. This chapter is long, but it has many sample programs in it. I personally feel that this is probably the most important chapter in the book. I want to make sure you have a handle on what's being discussed here. In this chapter, I'll discuss

• Interfaces and automation

• Variants and automation

• Dispinterfaces

• Dual interfaces

• Automating Microsoft ADO

In Chapter 3, I showed you what a type library is, how to create one, and how you can read the information out of a type library. As you saw, extracting the type information manually is tedious at best. The good news is that you typically won't need to work directly with type library data. In most cases, you will work with a type library indirectly through automation.

Defining Automation

As its name suggests, automation is a way to automatically control an application from within another application. Actually, you can build both in-process and out-of-process automation servers. As you'll see later in this chapter, each type of automation controller has its benefits.

Delphi makes it so easy to create and use automation servers that you almost do not need to know much, if anything, about COM basics. It's very easy to create a simple automation client.

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
 V: Variant;
begin
 V := CreateOleObject('Word.Basic');
 V.AppShow;
 V.FileNew;
 V.Insert('Automation is easy!');
end;

Believe it or not, this little snippet of code will start Word, create a new document, and insert the text "Automation is easy!" into the document.

Later in this chapter, in the section titled "Variants," I'll explain exactly what's going on in this code, but my goal at this point is to show you just how simple automation can be in Delphi.

Interfaces

By now I assume that you understand what interfaces are and how to use them. Interfaces are one of the two main methods used to gain access to an automation server's COM objects.

When you control an automation server through an interface, you use early binding. Early binding simply means that all calls made to interface methods are checked for the correct parameters at compile time. As a Delphi programmer, you should be familiar with early binding.

You've seen numerous examples of interfaces in previous chapters, so I won't show a procedure here for controlling an automation server through interfaces. This chapter provides many examples that use interfaces to control an automation server.

Variants

I discussed variants briefly in Chapter 2, "Interfaces and COM," mainly with respect to variant arrays. Not obviously, variants can also be used to control an automation server.

When you control an automation server through variants, you are using late binding. Late binding means that method calls are not resolved until runtime. This has some interesting ramifications. Consider the following code, which connects to Microsoft Word and instructs it to create a new file:

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
 V: Variant;
begin
 V := CreateOleObject('Word.Basic');
 V.AppShow;
 V.FileNew;
 V.Insert('Automation is easy!');
end;

I'm not going to go into detail about the CreateOleObject at this moment. Suffice it to say that it is used to create an instance of an automation server. I'll come back and discuss that function in more detail later.

What CreateOleObject actually does in this example is start a copy of Microsoft Word. It then obtains a reference to the Word.Basic interface, and stores that reference in the variant V.

By default, automation servers typically start up as hidden. The AppShow method displays the Word application.

Then, a call is made to V.FileNew, which creates a new Word document. Delphi (and Windows) performs a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to transform V.FileNew into a function call that creates a new document.

It's interesting to note that a variant is not a pointer to an object. How can you call methods on that "object," then? The answer is late binding. Delphi will actually accept anything you type here, without performing any type checking at all at compile time—in other words, Delphi does not perform early binding on variants. For instance, I could just as easily write the following code:

V.DelphiRules;

Delphi will compile this code just fine, but you can be fairly certain that Word doesn't implement a method called DelphiRules. If you attempt to execute this statement, you will receive the runtime error shown in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1
Calling a non-existent automation method results in this screen.

To understand how Delphi turns this code into method calls, we need to take a look at the IDispatch interface.

IDispatch is defined in the file system.pas like this:

 IDispatch = interface(IUnknown)
 ['{00020400-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}']
 function GetTypeInfoCount(out Count: Integer): HResult; stdcall;
 function GetTypeInfo(Index, LocaleID: Integer; out TypeInfo): HResult; stdcall;
 function GetIDsOfNames(const IID: TGUID; Names: Pointer;
  NameCount, LocaleID: Integer; DispIDs: Pointer): HResult; stdcall;
 function Invoke(DispID: Integer; const IID: TGUID; LocaleID: Integer;
  Flags: Word; var Params; VarResult, ExcepInfo, ArgErr: Pointer): HResult; stdcall;
 end;

The methods GetTypeInfoCount and GetTypeInfo should trigger something in your brain. IDispatch must consult the type library associated with the automation controller in order to resolve function calls at runtime.

That's exactly correct. As a matter of fact, what happens is the following:

1. Delphi passes the name of the method to IDispatch.GetIDsOfNames.

2. GetIDsOfNames returns an integer ID representing the method name.

3. Delphi calls the Invoke method, using the ID returned in Step 2.

This sequence of steps occurs for every method that you call on an object through a variant. The time required to execute these three steps is considerably longer than accessing the same object directly through an interface.

As a Delphi programmer, you might wonder why on earth anyone would want to use IDispatch to access an automation server. There are two very good reasons for doing so:

1. You're writing a program or macro in an application that doesn't support interfaces. Examples are Visual Basic or Microsoft Word.

2. You're writing a quick and dirty client program in Delphi, and you don't want to go through the bother of importing a type library.

Dispinterfaces

Somewhere between interfaces and variants are dispinterfaces. A dispinterface declaration looks almost identical to an interface declaration, except it uses the keyword dispinterface instead of interface. Here is a simple interface declaration, and then the corresponding dispinterface declaration.

// *********************************************************************//
// Interface: IUnitAuto
// Flags:  (4416) Dual OleAutomation Dispatchable
// GUID:  {A1E420C1-F75F-11D2-B3B9-0040F67455FE}
// *********************************************************************//
 IUnitAuto = interface(IDispatch)
 ['{A1E420C1-F75F-11D2-B3B9-0040F67455FE}']
 function Convert(Quantity: Double; InUnit: Integer; OutUnit: Integer): Double; 
safecall;
 end;

// *********************************************************************//
// DispIntf: IUnitAutoDisp
// Flags:  (4416) Dual OleAutomation Dispatchable
// GUID:  {A1E420C1-F75F-11D2-B3B9-0040F67455FE}
// *********************************************************************//
 IUnitAutoDisp = dispinterface
 ['{A1E420C1-F75F-11D2-B3B9-0040F67455FE}']
 function Convert(Quantity: Double; InUnit: Integer; OutUnit: Integer): Double; 
dispid 1;
 end;

This Delphi-generated code is taken directly from the first example program later in this chapter, so I'm not going to explain it in detail right now.

You should notice several things about this code right away.

• The IUnitAuto interface is derived from IDispatch, so if you create an automation server that implements IUnitAuto, clients can use late binding to talk to it.

• The IUnitAuto method Convert is declared as safecall.

• The IUnitAuto interface and IUnitAutoDisp dispinterface both use the same GUID.

• The IUnitAutoDisp dispinterface defines the same method (Convert) that the IUnitAuto interface defines. However, the dispinterface includes dispid 1 at the end of the method name.

When you use a dispinterface, you eliminate the first two steps associated with IDispatch. The automation controller does not have to call GetIDsOfNames, and the server does not have to respond with the dispid of the method in question. Instead, the dispid is determined at compile time. At runtime, the client program simply calls Invoke with the predetermined dispid.

Dispinterfaces are for client convenience only. You do not actually implement a dispinterface on the server. The server implements interfaces. The client application can elect to connect to the server using variants or dispinterfaces, assuming that the server's COM object also supports the IDispatch interface.

Dual Interfaces

A dual interface is simply defined as an automation server that supports clients connecting to it using interfaces (early bound) as well as clients connecting to it using variants (late bound). Any automation servers that you create with Delphi will automatically support a dual interface. This is desirable because it means that any automation server that you write can be accessed by almost any piece of software on the market today.

This section thoroughly covered automation and the way clients can access automation servers through use of interfaces, variants, dispinterfaces, and dual interfaces. The next section will take that information and apply it to the creation and use of in-process automation servers.