I am trying to use AuoIt in Perl to perform some windows automation. I am using its ActiveX control, which only provides core functionality but leaves out most of the more useful functionality, which are provided through User Defined Functions. Anyhoo, I have a windows application that has an embedded IE and I want to get control to its object to fill forms, read data - all the usual automation stuff.

Here is how I am approaching the problem. I use the AutoIt ActiveX control to get the handle (HWND) to the embedded IE. After this point, we use the the steps described here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/q249232/ to get the IE Object. To summarize, the whole process involves the following steps:

Get the HWND of IE using AutoIt

Send the window the WM_HTML_GETOBJECT message using RegisterWindowMessage

Pass the result of SendMessageTimeout to GetObjectFromLresult

Some code...

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::API;
use Win32::OLE;

my $autoIt = Win32::OLE->new("AutoItX3.Control");

my $app_title = "Test App";

my $win_title_match = $autoIt->Opt("WinTitleMatchMode", 1);
my $hwnd = $autoIt->ControlGetHandle($app_title, "", "[CLASS:Internet 
+Explorer_Server; INSTANCE:1]");

# At this point we should have the HWND

my $co_init = new Win32::API('ole32', 'CoInitialize', 'P', 'I');
$co_init->Call(0);

my $reg_window = new Win32::API('user32', 'RegisterWindowMessage', 'P'
+, 'I');
my $html_obj = $reg_window->Call('WM_HTML_GETOBJECT');

my $SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG = 0x0002;
my $lresult = " " x 80;

my $send_msg = new Win32::API('user32', 'SendMessageTimeout', 'NIIIIIP
+', 'N');
$send_msg->Call(hex($hwnd), $html_obj, 0, 0, $SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG, 1000, 
+$lresult);

$lresult = unpack('L', $lresult);

my $aInt = pack('LSSC8',0x626FC520,0xA41E,0x11CF,0xA7,0x31,0x00,0xA0,0
+xC9,0x08,0x26,0x37);

my $obj = new Win32::API('oleacc', 'ObjectFromLresult', 'PPIP' , 'N');
my $idisp = " " x 80;
my $obj = new Win32::API('oleacc', 'ObjectFromLresult', 'NPIP' , 'N');
my $ret = $obj->Call($lresult, $aInt, 0, $idisp);
print "Error: ", $autoIt->error(), "\n";
print "ret: ", $ret, "\n", "ie: ", $idisp, "\n", "idisp: ", unpack('L'
+, $idisp), "\n";
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Towards the end of the script, I do get a value for $idisp, which should be a pointer to the IHTMLDocument2 object. If you look at the example in the link I provided to Microsoft site, it is CComPtr<IHTMLDocument2> spDoc, which is $idisp.

Here is where I am stuck. When I unpack $idisp, I get a numeric value. Is this the memory location that the pointer is pointing to? It definitely is not an object since I cannot call methods like spDoc->put_bgColor() or in my script $idisp->put_bgColor(). So I am definitely confused here. Could some one help me understand how to use that pointer in my script?