[DELPHI] Loading unknown DLLs at runtime

[Varsity]

I am writing a plugin system in Delphi. My initial choice was a DLL-based system and I would still like to carry it through, but I've discovered that both the external overload and LoadLibrary function only work with constant values, so I cannot use them unless I know the name of the DLLs at designtime - which of course I don't. I've found several solutions but they are all so old they either don't work on 2000/XP or need Delphi 5 (I am using Delphi 7)! I've found Dragonsoft's plugin program too but it's not what I want. I just need a way to get DLLs at runtime, nothing else.

What can I do?

[smurfiness]

It's been a while since I used Delphi. IIRC, you need to cast to PChar to call LoadLibrary. Is there not a constant equivalent?

Off the top of my head, one thing you COULD do is write a small C++ DLL that you can call that calls LoadLibrary and returns the HINSTANCE to you.

[Varsity]

Dear god, it worked! :D

Only problem now is that I'm getting the unsafe type warning which I'm trying to avoid. Is there any way to get around pChar, too?

[smurfiness]

Oh, you're using managed Delphi. Didn't realize. In that case, you could use the Marshal class to marshal the string to an unmanaged char pointer, rather than using PChar.