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Created on: July 8, 1997

Quotes taken from http://207.181.222.15/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=210&Message_ID=26692

Date: July 13, 1998 12:41 PM
Author: Erich Forler (clickcreate@imsican.com)

I dug up an old e-mail from the engineers about MM Fusion and it's ActiveX support. This sheds a bit of light on why some controls will not make all of their facilities available in the event editor of Multimedia Fusion.

Multimedia Fusion can only access the facilities of an OCX control that fit into Fusion's Action/Condition/Function paradigm. If the control requires a parameter such as a pointer to a memory location, or an array, multimedia Fusion will ignore that part of the control. When Multimedia Fusion inserts an Active X object, it looks through all the facilities provided by the control to determine which parts of the control can be used by Multimedia Fusion. If part of the control uses a structure that's incompatible with Multimedia Fusion, then that facility of the control will not be made available in the Event editor. Typically if a facility in a control requires a string, integer, or Boolean value (0, 1) that facility will likely be available in the Event editor. If it requires a different parameter type or returns a different parameter type, it will not likely be available.

I hope this clears up the mystery a bit.

Erich Forler Product Manager Multimedia Fusion

Date: July 14, 1998 02:34 AM
Author: David Screve (secret secret :-))
Subject: ActiveX important information for users

As ActiveX designer and developer, I would like to add some information Erich cannot have because he's not the developer of this object. Although, he did give you most of the information.
1 - Sometimes, your ActiveX control cannot be added in Fusion because it does not appears in the list. This is NOT a bug. When adding a control, the ActiveX object checks the registry and the control. Usually, there are a large amount of controls that are not properly installed. Even such tools, as Control test container cannot instanciate these controls. In MMF, such controls do not appear in the list. In addition, Some controls do not have any TypeInfo, and I do not support the creation of such control (like many tools, from Microsoft too).

2 - Some properties, methods cannot be used in MMF because they use an unsupported data type in Fusion. This applies for Font, etc. I decided to hide these parameters to avoid unexpected crashes. I convert data type each time I can do it, be sure.

3 - ActiveX controls support Input, Output and In/Out Parameters. This provided ability to store information in parameters. You can retrieve parameters you gave to an action call, and get the result of the output parameters. This very interesting feature that required the developing a complex garbage collector with a complex memory management.

That's all for the moment.

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