Upgrading v3.6 OCX to V4.0 OCX in existing Progress Reports

[BartG]

We recently purchased and installed the most recent version of VPE (Pro Edition version 4.00).

We have many reports written in Progress ABL that use the older version (VPE version 3.6) of the OCX, and now when we attempt to open any of these programs to either run or maintain, we are getting error messages and can no longer edit the programs or run the reports.

The error we get when we try to open a program in the Openedge editor is “Unable to create control – Specified ActiveX control is not registered or the .ocx file was moved from where it was registered”, however, if we create a new program in the editor and include the ActiveX control (the new VPE version), it works with no problems.

The error we get when we try to execute one of the programs containing the VPE ocx is an “Object not found”.

We installed the new version 4.00 on a clean machine that did not contain the older version of VPE on it. We had no problems with the installation, and we had no problems when we registered the ActiveX control.

My question is, what do we need to do to be able to edit and/or run our existing programs/reports that were originally developed using the older version of VPE? Since we can’t open them, we can’t recompile them…can you tell us what to do or what we may have done incorrectly when we installed VPE 4.00? Is there a way to register the control properly or convert all of our existing report programs to use the new control?

[IDEAL Software Support]

When changing the API of the VPE DLL we must also change the name of the DLL in order to protect existing customers. We need to guarantee that multiple concurrent installations of different software-vendors - using different versions of VPE - on a single machine do not conflict.

Therefore, when we release a new version of VPE, we must change the GUID of the VPE ActiveX. The GUID is a 16-byte unique number, which identifies an ActiveX. For VPE v4.0 the GUID has been changed.

The GUID of v4.0 is 5705E07D-D921-48d3-B1A7-D5BD53D0EE83

The GUID of v3.60 was 06A6E173-B24C-49a7-8AF6-E362CE1055E7

What you can do in your Progress applications is:

a) Remove each VPE ActiveX from your forms and re-insert the new ActiveX (setting the name and other properties to the values of the old one).

b) You can use a binary search & replace tool to search for the old GUID and replace it with the new GUID. This is the more comnfortable way, if you have used a lot of instances of the VPE ActiveX. (For Progress the GUIDs are located in the ".wrx" files.)

Both techniques can also be used for other programming languages.