Delphi

Assert-based Error Reporting in Delphi

Posted on January 29, 2012January 29, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

[This is a very old article I wrote back in 2002 when I worked for a company which built MRI scanners and was subsequently bought by Oxford Instruments. The driver for this was “…Until Delphi acquires native functions equivalent to the C [__LINE__ and __FILE__] macros, … the need for this Assert-based framework … will remain” The need to trace errors to a specific class and line number, especially in production code, has only become stronger since then.]

Summary

This note describes a simple but flexible error-reporting and tracing framework for Delphi 4 and above based on Assert, which provides the unit name and line number at which errors were trapped and traces made.

Details

Background

Under the Delphi Language there is no simple way of replicating the C/C’++ macros _—FILE_— and _LINE_ to obtain the unit name and line number of memory address at runtime. However, in his paper “Non-Obvious Debugging Techniques” Brian Long points out that the Delphi compiler provides both unit name and line number during a call to Assert, and describes how assertions can be exploited to provide detailed execution tracing.

The framework described here extends this idea to allow flexibility in the processing of assertions. Assertion processing can be switched on and off at runtime; arbitrary filtering can be applied to any assertion; and both execution tracing and ‘standard’ assertion behaviour (i.e. raising an exception) can be effected. Assertions can therefore be left enabled in production code, at the expense of a slightly larger binary executable.

Continue reading Assert-based Error Reporting in Delphi

Understanding Delphi’s perception of COM

Posted on April 21, 2004March 6, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Delphi is great for COM if you want to do something simple; as soon as someting a little more complex is needed, COM in Delphi can be a real headache. Here is a braindump from a recent investigation:

The LocalServer class registration function CoRegisterClassObject is called for each Class Factory registered with the Singleton ComServer object in TComServer.Initialize. Class Factories are registered in the initialization section of units in which they are defined, and TComServer.Initialize does not get called until after Application.Initialize has been called (using some InitProc hackery in first ComObj and then ComServ). Crucially, ComServer is a helper object to guarantee registration of all the Class Factories in the application (or DLL), so ComServer.ObjectCount refers to the number of objects it has helped to create (via Class Factories) not the number of references held (say, externally) to any particular COM object.

A post from b.p.d.activex.controls.writing by one Patrice Corteel explains further:

Now let’s go a step further in COM threading model discussion and look at local and remote servers versus in-proc servers.
A Delphi local or remote exe server has a main thread which calls CoInitialize which makes it an apartment. And as a default behaviour, every COM component based on the delphi COM framework is created in this thread and marked as apartment threaded. If you explicitly spawn new threads you can initialize them as you want but you must get a marshalled interface to call components created by your main thread.
If you want to create free threaded components it’s far more difficult since you can’t rely directly on Delphi implementation and you have to rewrite large parts of ComServ and subclass many of ComObj classes. I’m currently working on this topic and I’ll post more on this when I am over with tests.

Note that if lengthy initialisation is needed, set ComServer.StartSuspended to True before Application.Initialize; this causes the class factories to be registered with the REGCLS_SUSPENDED flag, and ComServ.InitComServer makes the required call to CoResumeClassObjects to activate them again.

References

Binh Ly’s excellent COM pages at http://www.techvanguards.com/com/
Essential COM, by Don Box, 1998, Addison-Wesley

COM, Delphi and Python

Posted on April 15, 2004April 24, 2013 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I decided to write a command-line COM library registration tool, choosing C++ to flex some language muscles. This tool is needed to expand my Python+Excel -based automated calibration framework.

The first hurdle was char * style versus wchar_t * style character strings. What a nightmare! There are plenty of string types in C++, and plenty seem to work well, but ONLY on the condition that you stick with that one type and don’t mix. The standard output stream cout doesn’t support wchar_t, for example.

The thing that had me really stumped for a while was that the functions LoadTypeLib() and RegisterTypeLib() were returning S_OK but nothing was being changed in the Registry. Searching in some despair in the \Delphi5\Demos directory, I came across a project called TRegSvr, which did pretty much what I wanted. That worked first time – both reg and unreg – so what was different? Automatic calls to AddRef() and Release() in the Delphi code, of course. Adding in a call to pTypeLib->Release(); fixed the problem, although it is slightly baffling why NOT releasing the interface would cause the type lib NOT to be registered. Hmm.

Then I delved into Python’s COM support again, missing (until rather late into the process) this crucial information from Mark Hammond’s Python Programming on Win32:

…Python can’t support arbitrary COM interfaces; the pythoncom module must have built-in support for the interface…

Urg. In essence, even with the COM extensions, Python can only bind to IDispatch-supporting COM objects. Why the makepy utility wasn’t extended to all interfaces (given a suitable type library) I dunno. This, compounded by Delphi’s obfuscation of its COM support (e.g. an IDispatch-based object is actually an ‘Automation Object’ not just ‘COM Object’) made things a little slooow, but hey. Oh, and that’s forgeting that, in my installation, the \gen_py folder under win32com was missing, so that the generated Python file was dumped into %TEMP%.

Here is the COM reg/unreg program as it currently stands in all its ugliness:

// RegCOMSrv.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application.
 //
 // An application to register COM Servers and their type libraries
 //
 // At the moment, only works with EXEs, not DLLs, but see:
 // ms-help://MS.VSCC/MS.MSDNVS/com/register.htm
 //
#include "stdafx.h"
 #include
 #include
 #include
 #include
using namespace std;
/*
 CComHelper
Used to automate and guarantee the COM initialisation gubbins.
 */
 class CComHelper {
 public:
 CComHelper() {
 HRESULT hr = CoInitialize(NULL); // for some reason, CoInitializeEx() fails
 if (!SUCCEEDED(hr)) {
 throw "CoInitialize failed!";
 }
 cout << "Initialised COM" << endl;
 }
~CComHelper() {
 CoUninitialize();
 cout << "Uninitialised COM" << endl;
 }
 };
static bool REGISTER = true;
static int INDEX_SWITCH = 1;
 static int INDEX_APP = 2;
 static int INDEX_TYPELIB = 3;
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
 {
 cout << "RegCOMSvr.exe - Copyright 2004 (c) Matthew P Skelton"
 << endl << endl;
if (argc < 4) {
 cout << "Usage: RegCOMSrv " << endl << "e.g. 'RegComSrv /r MyApp.exe MyApp.tlb'" << endl << " 'RegComSrv /u MyApp.exe MyApp.tlb'" << endl << "where /r Registers and /u Unregisters both COM server and TypeLib" << endl;
 return 1;
 }
CComHelper _com_helper; // destroyed at end of main()
 bool mode;
 ITypeLib** ppTypeLib = NULL;
 ITypeLib* pTypeLib = NULL;
 TLIBATTR* pTLibAttr = NULL;
wchar_t theApp[255];
 wchar_t theTypeLib[255];
wchar_t* w_theApp = theApp;
 wchar_t* w_theTypeLib = theTypeLib;
//OLECHAR o_theTypeLib[255];
 //LPCOLESTR po_theTypeLib = o_theTypeLib;
//MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, argv[INDEX_APP], strlen(argv[INDEX_APP]), theApp, 255);
 mbstowcs(theApp, argv[INDEX_APP], 255);
 //theApp = argv[INDEX_APP];
 //wstring s_theApp(theApp, wcslen(theApp));
 string s_theApp = argv[INDEX_APP];
 cout << "App: " << s_theApp.c_str() << endl;
//MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, argv[INDEX_TYPELIB], strlen(argv[INDEX_TYPELIB]), theTypeLib, 255);
 mbstowcs(theTypeLib, argv[INDEX_TYPELIB], 255);
 //theTypeLib = argv[INDEX_TYPELIB];
 //wstring s_theTypeLib(theTypeLib, wcslen(theTypeLib));
 string s_theTypeLib = argv[INDEX_TYPELIB];
 cout << "TypeLib: " << s_theTypeLib.c_str() << endl;
//wcscpy(o_theTypeLib, theTypeLib);
if (0 == strcmp(argv[INDEX_SWITCH], "/r")) {
 mode = REGISTER;
 cout << "Registering..." << endl;
 }
 else {
 mode = !REGISTER;
 cout << "Unregistering..." <Release() before app exits !!!
 if (SUCCEEDED(hr)){
 cout << "LoadTypeLib() succeeded" << endl;
 //cout << **ppTypeLib
 }
 else {
 cout << "LoadTypeLib() failed with result: " << hex << hr <Release();
 return 2;
 }
if (mode) {
 //HRESULT hr = LoadTypeLibEx(o_theTypeLib, REGKIND_REGISTER, ppTypeLib);
cout << "Contents of 'o_theTypeLib' as passed to LoadTypeLib" << endl;
 int max_chars = wcslen(theTypeLib);
 for (int i=0;i<max_chars;i++) {
 cout << (char)(theTypeLib[i]);
 }
 cout << endl << endl;
hr = RegisterTypeLib(pTypeLib, theTypeLib, NULL);
 if (SUCCEEDED(hr)){
 cout << "RegisterTypeLib() succeeded" << endl;
 //cout << **ppTypeLib
 }
 else {
 cout << "RegisterTypeLib() failed with result: " << hex << hr <Release();
 return 4;
 }
/*
 hr = LoadTypeLibEx(theTypeLib, REGKIND_REGISTER, ppTypeLib);
 if (SUCCEEDED(hr)){
 cout << "LoadTypeLibEx() succeeded" << endl;
 //cout << **ppTypeLib
 }
 else {
 cout << "LoadTypeLibEx() failed with result: " << hex << hr << endl;
 return 2;
 }
 */
 }
 else {
 //cout << "UnRegisterTypeLib() rather tricky. Not unregistering at this time™." <GetLibAttr(&pTLibAttr);
 // __try {
 if (SUCCEEDED(hr)) {
 hr = UnRegisterTypeLib(pTLibAttr->guid, pTLibAttr->wMajorVerNum, pTLibAttr->wMinorVerNum, pTLibAttr->lcid, pTLibAttr->syskind);
 if (SUCCEEDED(hr)) {
 cout << "UnRegisterTypeLib() succeeded" << endl;
 }
 else {
 cout << "UnRegisterTypeLib() failed with code" << hex << hr <Release();
 return 7;
 }
 }
 else {
 cout <GetLibAttr() failed" <Release();
 return 6;
 }
 // }
 // __finally {
 pTypeLib->ReleaseTLibAttr(pTLibAttr);
 // }
 }
 /*
 NOTE: These calls to pTypeLib->Release are ESSENTIAL for this app to work properly
It seems that if we don't explicitly call it, COM does not update the registry after the
 program exits.
 */
 pTypeLib->Release();
int error;
 char szEXE[MAX_PATH];
wsprintf(
 szEXE,
 "%s %s",
 s_theApp.c_str(),
 mode ? "/REGSERVER" : "/UNREGSERVER");
cout << "Command line is: " << szEXE << endl;
error = WinExec(szEXE, SW_HIDE);
 if (error < 32) {
 cout << "(Un)RegServer failed." << endl;
 return 3;
 }
 else {
 cout << "(Un)RegServer succeeded." <

Another thing which was confusing earlier on was that VBA can create IUnknown-based objects, so long as the Reference (to the type library) is added first. It resolves the ProgID to the actual interface definition. Non-IDispatch objects must be typed correctly, thus:

Option Explicit
 ' seems like we have to declare this explicitly and include
 ' a Reference to it - this is because it is not IDispatch-based
 Dim obj As TestPythonCOM.TestPython ' <<

IDispatch-based objects can be declared with just Dim obj As Object. Anyhow, the solution is to create an Automation-style (i.e. IDispatch) enabled COM object, which will be controllable by both Excel and Python. COM Events can be hooked by Python (using win32com.client.DispatchWithEvents()), so the operator can hit a button in Excel, firing an event in the application/COM Server, which triggers code in Python, which then updates Excel! Eventually, the manual interventaion will be unneccesary, and the sched event scheduler class can be used instead, allowing Python to snag the data from the app when it sees fit.

For the VBA side of things, as related to the Delphi server, there is an excellent site at http://www.gekko-software.nl/Delphi/, particularly the article entitled Firing events. It shows how to declare a WithEvents class instance which will be used to sink events from the server.