The most COM+ common
administrative tasks (creating a COM+ application, installing/deleting a
component, setting a component attribute) can be accomplished manually with the
Component Services administrative tool from Management Console. But there a few
cases (installing the components or changing a component's value on a regular
basis) when it is necessary to have programmatic access to the COM+
applications, components and interfaces. And in another few cases is needed to
perform these operations without having access to MMC (remote computers without
TerminalServices's rights or low bandwidth). That's why I preferred to write a
class which provides access to the most essential COM+ tasks and to expose this
class through web services.
If you want to perform
some action on the COM+ applications or components it is good to know which
items (computers, applications, components or interfaces) are available. So in
the first part I'll present the class and web service responsible with this
duty. The structure of this first web service is:
-
GetComponents -
retrieves every component for the specified application
-
GetApplications - retrieves
every application
-
GetInterfaces - retrieves
every interface for the specified component
-
GetComputers -
retrieves the computers found in the Computers folder of the Component
Services administration tool
The Component Services
Administration (COMAdmin) Library is the point of access to the programmatic
administration of the COM+. The (COM+ 1.0 Admin Type) library is distributed by
default installation of the Windows 2000 in the %systemroot%\system32\com
folder. To be able to use it you need to add a project reference to this
library.
Now you can take a
look at the COMAdmin library with Object Browser and you can notice three
objects (ComAdminCatalog, ComAdminCatalogObject and ComAdminCatalogCollection).
The first object is dealing with the reading and writing to the COM+
registration database (RegDB). All collections are structured into a single
hierarchy. The ComAdminCatalog represents the root that contains the Application
collection. The Application collection has as children the Components and the
Roles collections. Access to these collections is a little unusual because you
can not access a child collection without accessing the parent collection.
I've tried to give
almost the same tree structure to the XML results as in the COM+ Services
administration tool for every web method.
Applications
Components
Interfaces
The GetComponents and
the GetInterfaces methods are adding at the top of the list the parent's details
(Application and Component) for a better vision.
The source code
includes a class which is responsible for building the collections and a web
service which is using the class for making it available outside so you have to
add yourself a reference to the COMAdmin Type Library in your project.