Invalid characters in the MDLCT rendition from MarvinOLE

Hi, I'm in the Informatics Tech Support department at Waters Corp. I've been tasked to see if MarvinSketch works with our eLab Notebook product, Waters Vision Publisher (VP). Our product uses MS OLE technology to create documents from many OLE sources. One of our customers wants use use MarvinSketch to store chemical structure data in VP. So far, this part of the integration works; I can create a MarvinSketch object in VP with the "MarvinOLE.Document" OLE object, double-click it to open it in Marvin, edit it, and transfer the results back to VP. The results are correctly displayed and stored in VP.


However, the customer also wants to be able to search on this data through VP's structure search engine. To make this possible, when VP gets the OLE rendition from Marvin, it also queries the OLE server for the MDLCT rendition. VP's structure indexing engine then parses the MDLCT data and stores it in the database. This process works with the MDLCT data provided a few competing structure editors, but with MarvinSketch, the process fails. The structure indexer complains about an invalid character at the beginning of the MDLCT data. This is what the MDLCT rendition looks like when I view it in VP:



x
rsion="1.0" ?>





I believe the first few characters are "0x0". What are these characters? I think they might be the Unicode Byte Order Mark, common in unicode-encoded data. Is this accurate? If so, can we configure MarvinSketch to not use the BOM?

I'm using MarvinBeans 5.2.4. The VP version is 7.1 Service Release 4 (latest release).

Hi,

would you please confirm that your OLE client code requests for CMarvinOLEDoc::MDLCTFormat? It seems to me, that the result you have problems with, is an xml. This means, that the result you have try to parse, is in mrv format, not in mdl ct.

Regards,
Istvan

I'm not an application developer, so I can't confirm for you whether the OLE client code calls that particular API. I don't have access to the code, only the application UI. In the UI, the user has the option to view the renditions available through the OLE object type. When I click on the MDLCT rendition, the preview window displays the text that I posted earlier. Attached is a screenshot of the MDLCT rendition from MarvinOLE, as seen in Waters Vision Publisher.

Dear Mike,

could you please click on the Marvin.Document format to see if the real MDLCT format got there somoehow, my suspecion is that these two things are mixed up.
And please send a picture again with the Marvin.Document content.

Thank you,

Viktor

P.S.:The only info I have regarding this GetData interface is that we have a costumer who invokes Marvin.OLE as an editor, and they never complained about any incorrect mol file they got back after editing. They also use C++ and MDL mol as outcome of the data amendment.