CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vbamfccomatl
James Thompson
James Thompson

Reputation: 1

Scripting MFC Dialogs via COM

MS Word has a very useful mechanism to wrap up its dialog boxes to use via COM or .Net. You can execute a "Display" method - which does the obvious - and also an "Execute" method which is equivalent to pressing "OK". I have a legacy MFC app which I am attempting to attach a COM object model to for scripting and regression testing, and I would like to do the same thing. It has a number of dialogs that I want to control programmatically from my test harness. It's been years since I really delved into MFC, and I can't find anything useful on t'internet so far.

My guess would be to wrap up the CDialog derived classes, perhaps within an ATL class (ATL is used extensively in the project), but I have a suspicion that there may be a better way.

Worst case scenario, I'll move the dialogs to C# and make them COMVisible (which is probably more strategic), but that's going to be more work.

Any thoughts and help appreciated - obviously this is rather antiquated technology!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 85

Answers (1)

Joseph Willcoxson
Joseph Willcoxson

Reputation: 6050

All CDialog derived classes in MFC are a subclass of CCmdTarget.

CCmdTarget is the baseclass for MFC COM functionality.

There is a lot of work you have to do under the hood. You should define and IDL file for your interfaces, compile the IDL, and then have the compiled typelibrary be a resource in your program.

There are helper macros for your CCmdTarget derived classes like:

DECLARE_INTERFACE_MAP()

BEGIN_INTERFACE_PART()
END_INTERFACE_PART()

BEGIN_INTERFACE_MAP()
INTERFACE_PART()
END_INTERFACE_MAP()

I would say that if you want to see how MFC does it, use the App Wizard and generate an MFC application that has OLE Automation enabled and then look at the generated code. It will show you what you need to wire up your MFC app for OLE Automation.

Upvotes: 2

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