Question

I am in the process of developing an ActiveX control for embedding in Rockwell Automation’s Factory Talk View. (See ActiveX DLL Error: Solved to see how great a start I got off to!)

At the moment I have an ActiveX control that seems to embed into the host system OK, but is not fully integrated into the VBA process. I believe that this is because I have not implemented some specific COM interface that is required, but I have no documentation as to what that is. I do know that standard MS controls like the Microsoft Forms 2.0 controls do implement the required interface and fully integrate.

The key functionality I am missing relates to a property that I need to set in order for my VBA code to actually see the ActiveX object. This property can be seen when opening the property panel for any activeX control placed on a Factory Talk screen, but NOT when looking at the properties of ActiveX controls embedded in (for example) Excel. Thus I am probably trying to chase down some custom Rockwell implementation. I am hoping that SO might be able to give me some aid into how to track down what I want based on recognizing the functionality it implements.

Now to the actual property. In Factory Talk the property is called “ExposeToVBA”, and has a type “long”. You have a choice of 3 values selected from a drop down list:

    Not Exposed         - When set to this, the controls name is not even visible to VBA code
    Type Info Extension - Not sure what this does
    VBA Control         - VBA code can see and interact with the control.

When I select anything other than “Not Exposed” for my control, I get a warning dialog box with no text on it. For other controls I need to set it to “VBA Control” in order to interact with it in the VBA code (d’oh)

I suspect that the value of this property is translated into some calls to an ActiveX interface on the target control.

The Question

What I want to do is identify what interfaces something like a “Forms 2.0 Label” implements that would match the above functionality. And also perhaps how I could translate this into my C# based control (based on C# ActiveX control (CSActiveX))

I know its a long shot, but I’d appreciate any and all suggestions

Answer 1

This became moot when I found a canned Active-x control that had the functionality that I needed.

FWIW This is what I believe that I used: DMGraph