Dll talk to calling form?

Hi,
I cant' seem to get this to work.

There's undoubtably a better way to do this, but what I'm trying is:

vb6 exe launches a form
the form init looks for running instance of acad
if it finds it, it passes active doc ref to vb6dll to do some cleanup work
on the doc

since i think the form is out of process and the dll is in process, to save
time, i thought that was what i wanted to do (use dll for the timeconsuming
work).

while the dll is working, i wanted to report back periodic progress for some
kind of indication to the user that it's working and didn't just freeze up.

one way was to update a label caption
so i tried to pass the label object to a property of the dll class but got
an error, cant pass objects blah blah

so i tried to call the form lable from the dll by saying
formname.labelname.caption = blah
but the dll code doesn't recognize the formname as a variable

so i tried to pass the form itself as the "calling owner" to a property of
the dll class and that also didn't work(same error as with label)

then i tried a sample i got off the net for a progress bar on a form but
the sample works with a command button but I haven't figured out how to get
the dll to show the form, calls in the dll to show the form seem to have no
effect, no error, no form shown, no progress bar....

any ideas on how to show a simple update of progress when a dll is doing the
work but a form is the user interface for displaying the progress?

seems like i should be able to figure this out on my own but after 2 days
and nights of trying and searching google and trying various samples i still
cant figure it out.

tia
Mark

 

You need to expose an event on your ActiveX server
in your dll, that fires periodically to give your
out-of-process client a chance to update its UI.

I don't know much about passing VB controls across
process boundaries, but wouldn't be too suprised
if trying to do that didn't work.

 

I'll have to read up on exposing events.

would that be like the dll having an invisible form with a timer on it, then
calling a sub in the ui form every so often?
for some reason the dll doesn't seem to see the form name as a variable that
can be accessed.

'or something to this effect?
'time consuming sub in dll
Private Sub LongSlowProcessInDll()
lCount = 0
'set progressbar max
ScanProg.Max = oDoc.ModelSpace .Count
ScanProg.Min = 0
ScanProg.Cur = 0

For Each oObj In oDoc.ModelSpace
'do something
CheckOut oObj
lcount = lcount + 1

'set current position of progress bar
ScanProg.Cur = lCount

'update to display change
ScanProg.UpdateStatus

'is this what allows it to go out and update the user interface form?
DoEvents

Next oObj

bDoneScan = True
ProgScan.Visible = False
End sub

 

Mark - No, not like an invisible form with a timer.

Events are just like the ones AutoCAD exposes. I do
not have much familiarity with exposing events in VB
so I can't help you there.

You want to fire the event every so often (once for
each entity is probably too frequently), so you might
do it once for every 10 entities or something like
that. The event is handled by the form/client and
it can update its UI, and call DoEvents to have the
updates reflected on the screen.

IOW, in the code below, where you have the call to
DoEvents, you would replace that with the code that
fires the event. The DoEvents call in your code is
probably not doing anything, since its not being
called from a form method.

 

Thanks Tony,
Now to assimilate and put to practice...
Mark

 

Try the VB Class Builder Addin. It can add events
to an ActiveX object.

 

Thanks I'll give it a try.