Lift the Veil from ActiveX Libraries - a Little Bit

[stefan_schnell]

Hello community,

 

often are ActiveX libraries subject of a discussion. Also often exists questions about methods, attributes or GUIDs from ActiveX libraries.With this blog post I describe how to lift the veil a little bit from ActiveX libraries.

 

Get the Object Viewer

 

The first step to lift this veil is to download the Microsoft Windows SDK, you can find the SDK here. The SDK contains a program to view all interface details of an ActiveX library. This program is called oleview. Download the standalone SDK and start SDKSetup.exe. Download the SDK for an installation on a separate computer.

 



After the successful download - which may take a few minutes - go to the directory Installers and start the installer Windows SDK Desktop Tools-x86_en-us.msi. After another few seconds you find in your Program Files (x86) directory a new directory with the name Windows Kits. Open the path 10\bin\x86, here your find the files oleview.exe and iviewers.dll. The preparations are now complete.

 

Possibilities

 

Execute the program oleview.exe and open the node Type Libraries. Now scroll down until you find a lot of SAP entries, e.g. like SAP GUI Scripting API. If you click on it you get some information about the Type Library.

 



 

If you double click on it a new window is opened. Here you see all detail informations about the library, all classes, methods, attributes and GUIDs. If you select a special class e.g. GuiApplication, you see only its information, e.g. the GUID of the class.

 



 

If you open the sub node Methods you see all methods of the class and if you select a special method, e.g. like OpenConnection you see its arguments and types.

 



 

On this way you can detect each detail of an ActiveX library. Also you can compare different versions of a library, if you store the information in text files and compare them. As you can see it is very easy to lift the veil from ActiveX libraries - a little bit.

 

Enjoy it.

 

Cheers

Stefan