Novell ® VBA Interoperability roundup Noel Power OpenOffice developer

Quick Review

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 3 History Started in response to customer demand Releases – SUSE 10.1 ( first appearance ) – SUSE SLED 10 ( first supported version ) Started VBA Interoperability incubator project – or – Sun & Novell agree to support a single solution – Lots of bits upstreamed, lots more to go

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 Architecture Modified Openoffice.org basic runtime – Running with in a special VBA compatability mode, the basic runtime can run native VBA code. ( Andreas Breagas does some fine work helping here as well ) VBA Excel api (C++) uno wrapper around existing Openoffice.org uno api – In the VBA compatibility mode the Basic runtime is aware of the wrapper api and its various globals and entry points etc. Supporting tweaks in core code – Mostly in calc but also, basctl, svx, scripting and basic ( others ?)

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 5 What works Large chunks of the key objects of the VBA Excel Api – Range – Worksheet – Workbook... etc. Support for VBA syntax exotica – Default methods & properties,Array of array etc. syntax – Object Modules/Userforms – Increased runtime function support Interaction with controls – Macro event handlers for both Form and OLE controls

What's new

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 WorkBook/Worksheet event support Good – Workbook/Worksheet events centralized ( can be enabled/disabled easily ) - Demo – Pretty good coverage of Workbook/Worksheet events Bad – Events are pushed ( could impact performance ) – Will need to be reworked eventually.

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 Object Modules What are they? – Key abstraction for binding builtin application objects ( Worksheet, Workbook ) with the basic runtime – Core building block for Userforms – Provide all sorts of fiddley behavior > pseudo inheritance by allowing the core application object to be extended. New procedures can only be accessed via fully qualified names e.g. ( Sheet1.myProcedure ) > Container for event handler routines – Should allow a 'better' event handling solution, the ObjectModule should register interest in the various events based on the presence of the event handlers.

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 9 UserForms Lots of tweaking of existing api ( controls ) Life cycle fun – Special initialize & terminate event handlers – Special load/unload behavior Binary import improvements – Progress bar – Misc tweaks to importer due to userform effort Control enhancements – [ Row|Source ]Control attributes for ListBox, ComboBox ( demo – listbox ) – spin-button

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved Miscellaneous improvements Module Properties – Formally only supported by class modules – Now supported for any module type Embedded Image Feature – Form controls now support embedded images in addition to linked ones ( thanks to Frank Schonheit for review and help ) > Now it's possible to Import MSO documents that contain images in controls > Previously Images in controls in an openoffice document were lost once the document was transported to a different location, this no longer needs to be the case

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. 1 Whats Next Support compatibility mode in Openoffice.org Basic xml – Get rid of the the same source options – Support missing required vba info ( codename ) Improve Userform & Controls compatibility Extend api coverage further Export support for macros (???) – Some difficulties with this though

What can you do to help

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved Help with testing – Write a testdocument > Examples at sc/source/ui/vba/testvba/TestDocuments Send macro snippets that don't work – Please, sensible small self complete contained examples ( in an Excel document preferably ) Help extend the compatability api ( you know you want to ) – Join the effort see the contact info

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved Contact Info Noel Power – Mail: Noel dot Power at Novell.com – IRC: service Freenode, channel #go-oo, nick noelp Pei Feng Lin – Mail: pflin at Novell.com – IRC: service Freenode, channel #go-oo, nick fong_

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