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Returning Safe Arrays from ASP Components
By Peter Persits
Copyright (c) 1999 Persits Software, Inc.
INTRODUCTION
This article will show how to return a Safe Array from an ASP component. It is important to remember that ASP script can only handle Safe arrays of VARIANTs and not any other types. This is, of course, not true about a Visual Basic environment which can handle many types of Safe arrays.
CREATING THE COMPONENT
The process of creating a skeleton active server component using Visual C++ and ATL ObjectWizard is described in detail in my first article, Handling Errors in Net API Components, so I won't dwell on it here. I assume that you have already created a component, say SafeArray, and added a simple object to it which you called ListManager. You may also use the ChgPass component which we built in the first article rather than  creating a brand-new one.
ADDING A METHOD RETURNING A SAFE ARRAY
Right click on an IListManager icon in the ClassView tree (or IPasswordManager if you have chosen to use the exising ChgPass component), and select "Add Method". Enter GetArray under method name, and

[out, retval]VARIANT * pVal

under Parameters.

Our method will use the vector template object found in the Standard Template Library (STL) to store a list of string values that we will use to populate our Safe Array. We are doing it purely for the sake of demonstration: vector is an extremely useful class that we will use all over the place in the future articles. To use the vector template, open StdAfx.h and add the following #include:
 
 

StdAfx.h
extern CComModule _Module;
#include <atlcom.h>

#include <vector>

If we now try to compile the project, we will get the compile warning

warning C4530: C++ exception handler used, but unwind semantics are not enabled. Specify -GX
        c:\program files\microsoft visual studio\vc98\include\xstring(521) : while compiling class-template member function 'void __thiscall std::basic_string<char,struct std::char_traits<char>,class std::allocator<char> >::_Copy(unsigned int)'

To get rig of that warning, go to Project/Settings, open C/C++ tab, select "C++ Language" and check off "Enable Exception Handling". Then click OK and build the project again.

We can now go ahead and add code for the GetArray method:
 
 

ListManager.cpp
STDMETHODIMP CPasswordManager::GetArray(VARIANT *pVal)
{

 // Create an array of names and fill it with dummy values
 std::vector<CComBSTR> arrNames;
 arrNames.push_back( "John Smith" );
 arrNames.push_back( "Ian Granovksi" );
 arrNames.push_back( "Tao Chan" );
 

 // Build and return a Safe Array of Variants
 VariantInit( pVal );

 pVal->vt = VT_ARRAY | VT_VARIANT;

 int nSize = arrNames.size();

 SAFEARRAY * psa;
 SAFEARRAYBOUND bounds = { nSize, 0 };

 psa = ::SafeArrayCreate( VT_VARIANT, 1, &bounds );

 VARIANT * VarArray;
 ::SafeArrayAccessData( psa, (void **) &VarArray );

 int i = 0;
 std::vector<CComBSTR>::iterator it;

 for( it = arrNames.begin(); it != arrNames.end(); it++, i++ )
 {
  VarArray[i].vt = VT_BSTR;
  VarArray[i].bstrVal = ::SysAllocString( (* it ).m_str );
 }

 SafeArrayUnaccessData( psa );
 pVal->parray = psa;

 return S_OK;
}

After the project is built we can go ahead and test the GetArray method with the following simple ASP script:
 
 

<HTML>
<BODY>
<%
Set ListObj = Server.CreateObject("SafeArray.ListManager")
' or Set ListObj = Server.CreateObject("ChgPass.PasswordManager")

MyList = ListObj.GetArray
For i = 0 to UBound( MyList )
 Response.Write MyList(i) & "<BR>"
Next
%>

</BODY>
</HTML>
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