Python Programming On Win32

Using Other COM Interfaces

So far, we have only discussed using IDispatch (or automation) COM objects from Python and only via Python helper classes. Although this is the most common way to use COM objects, more advanced applications often need native COM interfaces.

To illustrate this contingency, we will demonstrate the use of native interfaces with a little utility to dump statistics from a Microsoft Office application file (e.g., a Word document or Excel spreadsheet).

COM provides a technology known as structured storage . This is a set of functions and interfaces that allows you to store rich, hierarchical streams of data inside a single file, often referred to as a “filesystem within a file.”

Part of this implementation provides for standard properties about the file—the author of the file, for example. Windows Explorer is aware of these interfaces and can display the properties without any knowledge of the application that created the file. Microsoft Office stores its documents in structured storage files, and therefore the Windows Explorer can display rich information about Office documents.

To access these properties, call a COM function to open the structured storage file. This operation results in a PyIStorage object, a Python object that wraps the COM IStorage interface. If the document has standard properties, you get these through the COM IPropertySetStorage interface, which means you should perform a QueryInterface() on the PyIStorage object to get the needed interface. ...