MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual

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Getting started with COM and DCOM 765
COM Requirements
To use COM components in your ColdFusion application, you need at least the following items:
•
The COM objects (typically DLL or EXE files) that you want to use in your ColdFusion
application pages. These components should allow late binding; that is, they should
implement the IDispatch interface.
•
Microsoft OLE/COM Object Viewer, available from Microsoft at
www.microsoft.com/com/resources/oleview.asp . This tool lets you view registered COM
objects.
Object Viewer lets you view an object's class information so that you can properly define the
class
attribute for the
cfobject
tag. It also displays the object’s supported interfaces, so you
can discover the properties and methods (for the IDispatch interface) of the object.
Registering the object
After you acquire an object, you must register it with Windows for ColdFusion (or any other
program) to find it. Some objects have setup programs that register objects automatically, while
others require manual registration.
You can register Inproc object servers (.dll or .ocx files) manually by running the regsvr32.exe
utility using the following form:
regsvr32 c:\path\servername.dll
You typically register Local servers (.exe files) either by starting them or by specifying a command
line parameters, such as the following:
C:\pathname\servername.exe -register
Finding the component ProgID and methods
Your COM object supplier should provide documentation that explains each of the component's
methods and the ProgID. If you do not have documentation, use either the ColdFusion
cfdump
tag or the OLE/COM Object Viewer to view the component's interface.
Using the cfdump tag to view COM object interfaces
Effective with ColdFusion MX 6.1, the ColdFusion
cfdump
tag displays the following
information about a COM object:
•
Public methods
•
Put properties
•
Get properties
The method and property information includes the parameter or property types and whether they
are in, out, optional, or retval values. The
cfdump
tag output does not include the object’s
ProgID.
Note: The dump header indicates the ColdFusion object class, which is
coldfusion.runtime.com.ComProxy, and the COM object CLSID.