forum.vdsworld.com

[OCTAGRAM]

http://www.vdsworld.com/search.php?view_mode=fileinfo&file_id=519
https://osdn.net/projects/vds-ole-bridge/

This project is having little attention despite hanging in the most recent files on main page, so I decided to introduce what a game changer it is.

For features you lack out of box previously you had to use dedicated VDS extension, not suitable for any other product. Or you could use procedural DLL. But I haven't seen for years people making libraries this way.

OLE Automation is how libraries are interfaced to another programming languages. Windows 2000 or around introduced Windows Scripting Host with VBScript and JScript, and they all have ability to manipulate OLE Automation objects. Lots of OS features are exposed via WMI (Wbem etc.). For instance, I was enumerating network IPs and reconfiguring RDP server via WMI, in JScript. VBScript communities contain lots of recipes.

My VDS extension rejoins these worlds. Now Visual DialogScript can be a client of OLE Automation too. If there was a task you couldn't solve in VDS, try to look for "VBScript your-task-description", find if there is an OLE Automation class library for this task. OLE Automation bridge makes all the same libraries callable from VDS.

Windows seems to have means for interfacing any .NET assembly to OLE Automation. I have little knowledge about .NET, but I can see this is the way WinSCP gets interfaced to OLE Automation. I had success with using WinSCP from Visual DialogScript, following these steps:
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/library_install#registering

If there is some another .NET assembly, its author could probably miss writing these instructions, but you can try to apply all the same steps to your .NET assembly.

I hope it helps someone.

[cnodnarb]

This seems to have a lot of promise, but iI'm having a bit of trouble connection to 'Excel.Application'.

So the goals are

Connect Excel.Application
Add workbook (workbooks.add)
Set a cell as a range (activeworkbook.range("a1")
And set the range to a value (.value = 16)

Any way you can step through the example?

Thanks,

Brandon

[OCTAGRAM]

MS Office accessible from OLE Automation is independent from the open one if any. These are additional invisible instances. I enumerated opened files only to find out there are always none.

So you need to create (invisible) Excel application object, open new document, perform some actions, save document. Otherwise there are no visible traces of activity. One nasty thing about MS Office is that its invisible instances don't quit unless they receive Quit command, and if they don't quit, they keep file locks that only Task Manager can release. Try to not shutdown the visible Excel instance you may have important unsaved documents in. At least, that's how Office 2007 worked.

That is going to be something like:

[cnodnarb]

I've got other tools now in the RPA realm, but with hindsight this right here is extremely valuable in that someone could make a valuable RPA tool.

My thought is, connect to excel for dataset, connect to internet explorer for data input or additional datasets, then use window send etc. to input data into window based tools.

Again, great job with this.