Python Programming On Win32

Debugging Python COM Objects

When you use COM clients such as Excel from Python, you can employ the same debugging techniques as for any Python code; you are simply calling Python objects. However, when you implement COM objects in Python, things become more difficult. In this case, the caller of your Python code isn’t Python, but another application, such as Visual Basic or Delphi. These applications obviously have no concept of a Python exception or a Python traceback, so finding bugs in your Python code can be a problem.

In a nutshell: register your COM objects using -debug on the command line. Then use the Trace Collector Debugging Tool item on the PythonWin Tools menu to see any print statements or Python exceptions. The rest of this section is devoted to how this works.

To assist with the debugging problem, the Python COM framework has the concept of a dispatcher . A dispatcher is similar to a policy object, but dispatches calls to the policy. The win32com package provides a number of useful dispatchers.

When you register the COM Server with --debug (note the double hyphen), the registration mechanism also registers a dispatcher for your object. The default dispatcher is known as DispatcherWin32trace, although you can specify a different dispatcher using the _reg_debug_dispatcher_spec_ attribute on your object, as described in the earlier section Registering Your COM Server.

The default DispatcherWin32trace uses the win32trace module to display its output. To see the output ...