Python Programming On Win32

Wrapping and Unwrapping

Whenever you expose a Python object via COM, you actually expose an IDispatch object. As described previously, the IDispatch interface is used to expose automation objects. Thus, whenever a Visual Basic program is using a Python COM object, VB itself is dealing with a COM IDispatch object. The Python COM framework provides the IDispatch object that wraps your Python COM class instance. Whenever the COM framework creates a new Python COM object, the general process is:

• An instance of the selected policy for the object is created.

• The policy creates an instance of your Python class.

• An IDispatch object is created that wraps the Python policy (which in turn wraps your instance).

• The IDispatch object is returned to the client (e.g., Visual Basic).

Thus, when you need to create an IDispatch from a Python class instance, you should wrap the object. Unwrapping is the reverse of this process; if you have an IDispatch object that wraps a Python instance, you can unwrap the IDispatch object, returning the underlying Python instance.

In many cases you don’t need to worry about this. When you expose a COM object that can be directly created via COM, the Python COM framework handles all the wrapping for you. However, there are a number of cases where the explicit wrapping of objects is necessary.

The most common scenario is when you need to expose a COM object via some sort of factory method; that is, rather than allowing the user to create your object directly using VB’s ...