6.2.1 Browsing Methods

The Active Directory schema container and objects allow an application to determine what objects and properties are supported by a given provider. It is often useful to determine what methods are supported by a given object and what parameters are required by those methods. COM provides a mechanism for providers of COM objects to describe the methods and parameters supported by their objects. This information is called type information and is supplied in Type Libraries.

Active Directory provider writers are required to supply type libraries and help files documenting the interfaces their provider supports. COM defines two interfaces for obtaining the type information for a given class:

Providers must support IDispatch::GetTypeInfo and may optionally support IProvideClassInfo::GetClassInfo. Both provide an ITypeInfo interface for the class hosting the interface. Consult the COM documentation for details on using these interfaces to browse the interfaces and methods on a class.

Microsoft provides a type library documenting all the standard interfaces supported by Active Directory (these are the interfaces documented in this specification). This type library is ActiveDs.TLB. Provider writers must supply a type library that contains all of the information found in ActiveDs.TLB and additional type information documenting any provider-specific extensions.