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The Marshaling Mechanism
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Marshaling is the mechanism that allows a client to make interface function calls to remote objects in another process or on a different machine. Marshaling

- Takes an interface pointer in the server's process and makes a proxy pointer available to code in the client process.
- Transfers the arguments of an interface call as passed from the client and places the arguments into the remote object's process space.

For any interface call, the client pushes arguments onto a stack and makes a function call through the interface pointer. If the call to the object is not in-process, the call gets passed to the proxy. The proxy packs the arguments into a marshaling packet and transmits the structure to the remote object. The object's stub unpacks the packet, pushes the arguments onto the stack, and calls the object's implementation. In essence, the object recreates the client's call in its own address space.

The type of marshaling that occurs depends on what interface the COM object implements. Objects can use a standard marshaling mechanism provided by the IDispatch interface. This is a generic marshaling mechanism that enables communication through a system-standard remote procedure call (RPC). For details on the IDispatch interface, see Automation Interfaces. Even if the object does not implement IDispatch, if it limits itself to automation-compatible types and has a registered type library, COM automatically provides marshaling support.

Applications that do not limit themselves to automation-compatible types or register a type library must provide their own marshaling. Marshaling is provided either through an implementation of the IMarshal interface, or by using a separately generated proxy/stub DLL. Delphi does not support the automatic generation of proxy/stub DLLs.

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In-process

Automation

Aggregation

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