Once the ActiveX control is instantiated, the control-frame affords access to one widget and three COM objects, including the:

  • Control-frame widget
  • Control container (the control-frame COM object)
  • Control collection (a standard COM object)
  • ActiveX control (the target COM object)

The following figure shows the chain of handle references that connect a control-frame widget (with widget handle CF) to an ActiveX control (with the Name CSSpin).

Figure 1. Handle references to access ActiveX controls


The chCF reference is a component handle to the control-frame COM object (control container) and the chCOL reference is a component handle to the control collection. Thus in ABL, you can instantiate and get the handle to an ActiveX control in two ways:

  • Using the name of the ActiveX control (CSSpin) as if it were a property (Control-Name property) of the control container (chCF:CSSpin)
  • Using the indexed Item property of the control collection (chCOL:Item(1))

Once you have the component handle of the ActiveX control, you can access all of its properties and methods. (The chCSSpin reference is a component handle variable you might set from chCF:CSSpin or chCOL:Item(1).) The following examples reference a reduction of typical code generated by the AppBuilder. For a closer look at actual code generated by the AppBuilder, see Programming ActiveX controls in the AppBuilder.