COM tracing ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Michael,

On 30/03/17 21:16, Michael Stefaniuc wrote:
>> 	I'd -really- love some input on how best to trace that series of COM
>> method calls on Windows itself ie. the (remote) service activation, and
>> the RPC beyond that - particularly the method names, parameters etc. of
>> the COM/OLE Office API. I've tried (so far):
>
> don't you have at least a tlb file for the culprit COM stuff? You can
> look at that with oleview; Wine implements one too should you be on Linux.

	Sure - I have the type information (it turns out) - thanks for the pointer.

>> 	Component models used to be all the rage in my youth ;-) surely someone
>> solved the "strace for COM calls" problem elegantly some-when !
>
> Well Wine has that built in for the stuff it implements. For the rest we
> write tests that exercises the respective API.

	Makes sense.

>> 	Crazily - might it be possible to instrument, interpose and use Wine's
>> COM impl. on Windows [ which sounds a bit 'exciting' ;-], or ?
>
> You don't need Wine for that. You can write wrappers around the COM
> classes you need, easily if you have the info from the TLB.

	Ok ? so I have a huge chunk of XML from tlb2xml from here - which is
nice; the approach you'd suggest is manually, incrementally writing
wrappers and interposing them between MS Office and the automation to
work out what methods are being invoked ? an incremental approach makes
the problem somewhat hard to scope I suspect.

	Anyhow - many thanks for the input.

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot