How to programmatically fight with WPS:Description
From EDM2
Programmatic access to WPS is complicated due to several reasons:
- Most APIs are accessible only from inside the WPS process (the second copy of PMSHELL.EXE), or via DSOM/CORBA via remote method call.
- To call things from inside the WPS process one needs to "inject" a WPS class into the system; possible bugs in the object will jeopardize the WPS integrity, thus the usability of the computer. This makes WPS classes much harder to design than "ordinary" applications.
- The current implementation of DSOM lacks run-time method-dispatch-by-name, thus one needs to use CORBA (DII) to make arbitrary method calls from scripts. AFAIK, there is no scripting solution which uses DII for its operation.
- Even with this hard-to-reach API, there is no API to fetch the data which allows reconstruction of the object state (serialization/deserialization, marshalling etc). Thus one needs to use undocumented ways to fetch the object state.
- There is a small subset of API (Win*Object* (C) and Sys*Object* (REXX) API) usable from outside of the WPS process. However, the control provided by this API is very restricted.
However, some stuff can be done even with such low-grade stuff as plain REXX.
