An OLE document server is an application that provides an interface for linking or embedding documents inside other applications. A classic example of this is placing an MS Excel spreadsheet inside of an MS Word document. OLE document server and container applications use numerous COM interfaces to communicate with each other and negotiate this complex act of cooperation. Fortunately, MFC provides classes that hide this complexity and make it easy to implement both OLE document servers and containers.

This section explains how to add OLE document server support to an Objective Views application. It’s easy to do because MFC does most of the work. Using the Objective Views AppWizard and selecting either Full-Server or Both container and server for compound document support generates an application with basic OLE document server support. If you use the Objective Views AppWizard to generate an OLE document server application, you do not need to follow the steps described in this section. However, you should still read this section if you want to understand the generated code.