Working in the dark on an OLE application

Question

I am working in the dark. There is an application installed on my PC by the corporate fathers that allows programmatic access to a library of reports. I can't get anyone to tell me the application's properties or methods (apart from a couple methods found in some scripts....)

I'm using Access VBA to get to the application, and it does load it up (it shows a GUI when the CreateObject() statement is executed.)

How can I get it to list its properties and methods once I invoke it? You can see my effort, but it fails saying "Object doesn't support this property or method" when it executes the "for each" statement.

Sub StartDataNav()
  Set oleDataNav = CreateObject("DataNavigator.Application")
  Dim p As Object
  For Each p In oleDataNav.Properties

  Next p

End Sub

If need be, I can change to C#.net, but I'm not as experienced invoking what I assume is a non-managed application....

Answer 1

You can use the TlbInf32.dll (TLI) to inspect the public members of the target application. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/bb985086.aspx seems to be a good start.

Or just inspect TLI itself using the object browser (after referencing it in the VBE).