OPENSTEP 4.2  Copyright1997 by Apple Computer, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

OPENSTEP 4.2 Release Notes: 
The NeXT OLE ORB

This document lists all of the API changes and some of the bug fixes relating to the NeXT ORB for this release.

New Features in This Release

Supporting Localization in OLE Automation

OLE Automation offers support for localization by allowing the developer to specify a locale when looking up the names of properties, or of methods and their arguments. In release 4.1, the NeXT ORB would always specify the default system locale for the machine it was running on when matching an OLE method or property to a given Objective-C method. As a result, the Objective-C protocols a client used to talk to an OLE server would depend on the host on which the server was running. For this reason, the ORB now has new methods which allow you to specify the language to use when connecting to OLE Automation objects. From Objective-C, instead of using: 

-(id)objectWithRegisteredName:(NSString *)name
protocol:(NSString *)proto
host:(NSString *)hostName

you can now use: 

-(id)OLEObjectWithRegisteredName:(NSString *)name
localeId:(unsigned long)localeId
host:(NSString *)hostName

From Visual Basic, the alternative to this standard call:

orb.connectTo(name, protocol, host)

is:

orb.connectUsingOLE(name, localeId, host)

In the above, the localeId arguments are Win32 LCID's: 4-byte quantities which specify a primary language and sublanguage. (For more details see the Microsoft Win32 SDK documentation.) Common values are 0x9, for ªneutralº English, or 0x409 for North American English.

These new methods set the locale for the returned object. Also, the locale propagates recursively to all objects returned from that one.

Bugs Fixed in This Release

Supporting ªOldº DO

In OPENSTEP 4.1, OLE clients were unable to connect to Objective-C servers using ªoldº (NXConnection-based) DO. This has been fixed in release 4.2. However, this fix involves a change to the file nxorb.m (shipped on Windows systems in the directory NextDeveloper/Libraries). If you want Objective-C and OLE Automation objects to communicate using old DO, your Objective-C programs must be re-linked against the new version of this file.