working with DLLs (on windows)

Chief

I need to know how to work with a DLL with PHP... I've never done it before. I assume i use the COM() functions, but I can't seem to get that to work... I'm not sure what to use for the parameters.

I also tried loading the DLL into the automatically including extensions in the config file, but i get the error:

PHP Warning: Unknown(): Invalid library (maybe not a PHP library) 'XXXxxXXX.dll' in Unknown on line 0

Is there a tutorial or an overview somewhere on working with DLL's in PHP?

Thanks in advance

tsinka

What kind of dll do you want to work with ?

Thomas

Chief

honestly, i guess i don't really know.... what are my options? 🙂

it's a custom dll written for creating licensing for a software product. essentially it takes in some information, performs some algorithms, and spits out a hash

i have the source, is there someway i can check what "kind" of dll it is? it's a bunch of .cpp and .hpp files with a few .h files

tsinka

The problem is that AFAIK you can't access a dll directly with PHP. I think it must be a COM enabled dll that has been registered.

But you could write a simple command line application (a few lines) linked against that dll that uses some command line parameters with that dll and just prints the hash to stdout. Then call that app with PHP (system,exec...) and fetch the output.

EDIT: you have the sources of the dll. Change the sources slightly so that you can compile an application instead of a dll. Doing so you'll have just one executable you can use.

Thomas

Chief

that's a great idea, and i have it now in a command line executable form... however i'm getting an "unable to fork" error:

Warning: system(): Unable to fork [cli-app.exe]

any thoughts??

thanks again,
chief

edit: the same error comes with system() and exec()

edit2: the problem was with permissions... i needed to give the IIS user rights to run cmd.exe - a security hole 🙁

here's the command: cacls c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /E /G IUSR_ADMIN2003:F where IUSR_ADMIN2003 is the IIS username

if anyone has another solution, one that isn't so insecure, i'd love to hear it. thanks for all the help so far