PNA Interfaces

A COM interface is the connection to an object. When you get a handle to an object, you are actually using an interface to an object. This subtle distinction is relevant to the COM programmer for the following two reasons:

Other Topics about COM Concepts

Interface Inheritance (Coding for Multiple PNA Versions)

The PNA continues to evolve and release new firmware / software versions that provide more functionality and features. New commands are added to existing objects, and with them new interfaces are added to support those commands. For example, new commands were added to the Measurement object in PNA release 3.0. These commands are accessible from the new IMeasurement2 interface. This can be important if you develop code using the type library in release 3.0, and run the code on a PNA with an older release, such as 2.0

When you use a command that was new with release 3.0, and you run that code on a PNA with release 2.0 firmware, errors will occur because that PNA does not recognize the new commands. However, even if you do NOT utilize new commands, errors can still occur. The following example shows how this occurs and how to avoid it.

The following Visual Basic statement dimensions the meas variable as an object.

Dim meas As Measurement

When the program compiles, Visual Basic figures out what interface to use to access that object. When dimensioning as an object, VB will use the default interface. As new interfaces are added to an object, they become the default interface. If this program was developed and compiled using the PNA 3.0 type library, the default Interface of the Measurement Object was IMeasurement2. However, if this program is run on an instrument with PNA 2.0 firmware, there was no IMeasurement2 Interface, and an E_NOINTERFACE error will occur.

Therefore, the more robust approach would be to specify the interface instead of the object when declaring a variable.

Dim meas As IMeasurement

This code will ONLY use the IMeasurement interface; not the default interface.

However, regardless of how you declare a variable, errors will always occur if you use new commands, and run the code on an older instrument.

Custom Interfaces

The PNA object model contains three "custom" interfaces use "typed" variables, which is more efficient than using variant type variables. However, these interfaces are only usable from VB6, C, & C++.  All other programming languages must use the other standard interfaces.

The custom interfaces are: