OSP Language Reference

OSP (for OLE DB Simple Provider) is a set of Internet Explorer APIs that includes a limited number of COM interfaces and associated methods. It is designed to let you easily expose simple data (such as in-memory arrays of string and variant data types) to data-binding controls in HTML pages, Internet Explorer HTML forms, and consumer applications.

OSP API Documentation

The OSP API interfaces and methods documented here are also described in the Internet Explorer SDK. However, this version of the OSP documentation includes additional information specific to the Toolkit's usage of OSP.

OSP and the Toolkit

The Toolkit uses the OSP API as an integral part of its OLE DB provider architecture. Think of it using OSP as a building block by which OLE DB functionality is exposed over your simple data. As a provider writer using this toolkit, you use OSP methods to:

Expose a data source. You must implement a separate OSP for each data source you want to expose.
Build OSP Data Objects (ODOs). These data objects do the following:
- Encapsulate one or more OSPs.
- Expose the correct OSP instance to the OLE DB Simple Provider DLL (using either the IDataSource interface or the msDataSourceObject method).
- Send notifications to the OLE DB Simple Provider DLL.

OSP Interfaces

OSP defines two interfaces (click on either to jump directly to its reference page):

OLEDBSimpleProvider, which implements the methods used for data access.
OLEDBSimpleProviderListener, which specifies the methods to be implemented by the consumer for receiving notifications of data changes.

Method Categories

The OSP methods you can implement with the OLE DB Simple Provider Toolkit can be categorized as follows:

Category	Description
Schema	Obtain basic metadata information about the underlying rows and columns.
Data Access via Variants	Retrieve and set variant values in the data set.
Insert/Deletion	Insert/delete rows and columns into the data set.
Find	Implement basic search functionality across the data.
Localization	Implement functionality for data conversions based on country.
Event handler	Register (and unregister) an event handler, which can be notified of changes to cells, rows, and columns.
Asynchronous data population	Allows data to populate a target application or control asynchronously.
Notifications	Notifies, through an event handler, changes to cells, rows, and columns.