Active Documents

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Active documents provide an extension to traditional embedded objects. The Active documents may be multipage and are displayed in the entire client area. They do traditional menu negotiation, and can be edited in-place as well as in an open window in the server application. Instead of displaying as a small rectangle surrounded by a hatched border, Active documents are full frame and always in-place active.

Active documents can be viewed in a container like the Microsoft Office Binder, which provides a way to create a compound document made up of different document types like Excel, Word, and your custom document type, each of which can be edited full frame. Active documents can also be displayed in a browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, which is an Active document container.

Advantages of Active Documents

Active document features include:

Requirements for Active Documents

The interfaces listed in the table below include interfaces already required for embedded servers and several new interfaces specific to Active documents. MFC provides default implementations for most of these interfaces in the COleServerDoc class.

A document that . . . Implements these interfaces
Uses compound files as its storage mechanism. IpersistStorage.
Supports the basic embedding features of Active documents, including Create From File. IpersistFile, IoleObject, and IDataObject.
Supports in-place activation. IoleInPlaceObject and IoleInPlaceActiveObject (using the container's IOleInPlaceSite and IoleInPlaceFrame interfaces).
Supports the Active document extensions that involve these new interfaces. Some interfaces are optional. IoleDocument, IOleDocumentView, IoleCommandTarget, and IPrint.

MFC provides support for extending existing embedded server support to Active documents.

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