Changes

1.4

• Ensure moniker is correct when a parameter includes an embedded quote (Thanks to Wim Hoekman for the bug report)
• Ensure from_time() copes with negative timezones (Thanks to Zlatko Lovevic for the bug report)
• Pull back all fields for an event where none is specified (Thanks to Matt Kosek for the bug report and the detective work)
• WMI now needs Python 2.4+. It wouldn’t be impossible to continue to support older versions but it’s increasingly onerous and 2.4 is now 5 years old.
• Tests - WMI now comes with a unittest-based set of tests which have been run (and passed) against all versions of Python from 2.4 to 3.2 using pywin32 214.
• Exception changes - x_wmi and its subclasses now store the underlying COM error as x_wmi.com_error instead of returning an equivalent string. This should help code which needs to know the exact error which occurred and should also make it easier for non-ASCII systems which were experiencing difficulties when the code attempted to manipulate non-decoded byte strings.
• Specific trapping of uninitialised threads - like all COM-based code, WMI needs to be initialised if run inside a thread. If this isn’t done, the error message is slightly obscure. The connection maker now traps this specific case and returns a specific exception: x_wmi_uninitialised_thread.
• More specific checks for invalid connection combinations - certain combinations of identification and authentication are invalid when connection. A specific exception is now raised for these: x_wmi_authentication.
• keys - each _wmi_object now has a _wmi_object.keys attribute, inferred from the underlying WMI class definition, which is the list of attributes which uniquely define an instance of that class.
• associated_classes - each _wmi_object has an _wmi_object.associated_classes attribute which is a dictionary mapping the names of the other WMI classes which can be associated to this one to their _wmi_class objects. This is most immediately of use in the wmiweb browser (qv) but can be used by client code.
• By default, the WMI() connection function – the one you call most often – no longer looks to find the subclasses of a namespace. This makes for much faster startup times: altho’ it was always possible to pass find_classes=False this was little known, and you now have to pass find_classes=True to get this functionality, or use the _wmi_namespace.classes attribute which is now calculated lazily, so things like IPython’s attribute lookup still work.
• wmiweb.py - the installation now ships with a small but functional web-based WMI browser. It uses only the stdlib WSGI server and makes it easy to explore any of the namespaces on the local or a remote machine.
• Removed the rarely-used Win32 autoprefix: previously, if you tried for a class called Process, the module would try it again under Win32_Process if it failed first time round. This has now been removed to avoid the magic and because I certainly never use it, and I’m not aware of anyone who did.
• Impersonation & Authentication levels now supported when connecting to a remote server with specific credentials. Thanks to Matt Mercer for sample code.
• Documentation is now Sphinx-based.
• Association classes no longer try to treat all their attributes as WMI classes. (Thanks to Miroslav Ježek for the bug report)
• Setting a property’s value now works again (Thanks to John Holcomb for the bug report and the detective work)

1.3

• Support for IPython’s getAttribute protocol (patch supplied by Igor Dvorkin)
• Allow positional parameters for method calls. Previously, parameters had to be passed by keyword and failure to do so resulted in an obscure error message.
• Allow extrinsic events to use the same watcher API as intrinsic ones. Under the covers these behave slightly differently. Intrinsic events now default to modification rather than creation.
• Remove the restriction where an instantiated class didn’t know its own namespace.