9 Dynamic Management of Any Values

   An any can be passed to a program that doesn’t have any static information for the type of the any (code generated for the type by an IDL compiler has not been compiled with the object implementation). As a result, the object receiving the any does not have a portable method of using it.

   The facility presented here enables traversal of the data value associated with an any at runtime and extraction of the primitive constituents of the data value. This is especially helpful for writing powerful generic servers (bridges, event channels supporting filtering).

   Similarly, this facility enables the construction of an any at runtime, without having static knowledge of its type. This is especially helpful for writing generic clients (bridges, browsers, debuggers, user interface tools).

   Contents

   This chapter contains the following sections.