▼ |  | Myster X: Using Windows COM Objects in Racket

1 | Overview
2 | COM
3 | Active X and DHTML
4 | Version
| Index

► | 1 | Overview

1.1 | Installation
1.2 | Running a Demo
1.3 | Loading
1.4 | Remote COM servers (DCOM)

On this page:

1.1`` Installation
1.2`` Running a Demo
1.3`` Loading
1.4`` Remote COM servers (DCOM)

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### 1`` Overview

#### 1.1`` Installation

MysterX requires Internet Explorer (IE) 4 or later to be installed. Distributed COM (DCOM) for your version of Windows is also required. Recent versions of Windows come with DCOM; DCOM packages for Windows 95 and 98 are made available separately.

Two Windows DLLs support low-level operations in MysterX: "myspage.dll" and "myssink.dll". Both are installed in the registry (using regsvr32.exe) when raco setup runs the MysterX post-installer. If you move the location of your Racket installation, you may need to re-run raco setup to make MysterX work. Neither of these DLLs is specific to a Racket version, so it’s ok for one version of Racket to use the DLLs registered by another.

> > > Prior to version 369.4, "myssink.dll" was version-specific. Its GUID was changed when it was made version-independent.

If you build a stand-alone executable that uses MysterX, you need to specifically include "myspage.dll" and "myssink.dll" with your distribution, and the DLLs will need to be registered on the end user’s machine. One way to do that is to include the following little setup program (as an executable) in your distribution:

( module setup scheme/base
( require mzlib/runtime-path
mzlib/process)
; Ensure that DLLs are included with the distribution:
(define-runtime-path myspage-dll '(so "myspage"))
(define-runtime-path myssink-dll '(so "myssink"))
; Register the DLLs:
( define regsvr32
( path->string ( find-executable-path "regsvr32.exe" #f)))
(system* regsvr32 ( path->string myspage-dll))
(system* regsvr32 ( path->string myssink-dll)))

#### 1.2`` Running a Demo

Try

( require mysterx/mxdemo)

The demo requires the MSCal Calendar control. The calendar control is normally installed with Microsoft Office, but it can also be downloaded from elsewhere; look for "mscal.ocx".

#### 1.3`` Loading

Load the MysterX module with

( require mysterx)

Because some MysterX code relies on the scheme/class class system, you may also need

( require mzlib/class)

Several MysterX procedures take HTML strings as input. The xml library provides procedures that convert Racket syntax into XML strings. You may find using these procedures useful in creating HTML strings for use by MysterX.

#### 1.4`` Remote COM servers (DCOM)

For the MysterX procedures cocreate-instance-from-coclass and cocreate-instance-from-progid, the optional where argument can be 'remote. In that case, the server instance is run at the location given by the Registry key

> HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\‹CLSID›\RemoteServerName

where ‹CLSID› is the CLSID of the application. This key may be set using the dcomcnfg utility. From dcomcnfg, pick the application to be run on the Applications tab, then click on the Properties button. On the Location tab, choose Run application on the following computer, and enter the machine name.

In order to run a COM remote server, the registry on the client machine must contain an entry at

> HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\‹CLSID›

where ‹CLSID› is the CLSID for the server. The server application itself need not be installed on the client machine.

There are a number of configuration issues relating to DCOM, which MysterX uses to invoke remote COM servers. The Web page

> http://www.distribucon.com/dcom95.html

discusses how to setup client and server machines for DCOM.

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