NAME

oleauto - OLE Automation extensions

DESCRIPTION

OLE Automation provides Visual Basic-like scripting capabilities to Perl 5 under Windows NT or Windows 95, exploiting the object-oriented programming facilities of Perl 5.

The OLE Automation extensions have been completely rewritten since the previous major version of Perl for Win32 (09x), resulting in a much cleaner syntax and added support for embedded objects (no more MkOLEx kludges!). OCX's are currently not supported, nor are VBX's.

Syntax

A simple Microsoft Excel application:

use OLE; $excel = CreateObject OLE 'Excel.Application.5' or warn "Couldn't create new instance of Excel App!!"; $excel->Workbooks->Open( 'test.xls' ); $excel->Workbooks(1)->Worksheets('Sheet1')->Cells(1,2)->{Value} = 'foo'; $excel->Workbooks(1)->Worksheets('Sheet1')->Cells(1,2)->{Value} = 'bar'; $excel->Save(); $excel->Quit();

OLE Automation objects are created using the CreateObject method of the OLE module. The name of the class of OLE object to create is supplied as the only argument. On success, the handle to the object is returned, otherwise undef is returned.

$object = CreateObject OLE $class or warn "Couldn't create instant of $class!!\n";

To invoke methods or retrieve properties within the object, one then uses the standard Perl 5 O-O syntax. Arguments must be supplied in the correct order (usually in the order that they are listed in the documentation associated with a particular class. e.g. in the help files for Microsoft Excel).

$object->wave(); $object->say_hello();

Properties are also accessible via the perl object's hash structure. Since the return value of a function cannot be treated as an lvalue, the hash is the only means by which we can modify an object's properties.

print "I weigh this many pounds: ", $object->{weight}, "\n"; $object->{weight} -= 25; print "Hey, I lost 25 pounds, I now weigh this many pounds: ", $object->{weight}, "\n";

If a method or a property returns an embedded OLE object, it can automatically be treated as a perl object itself. E.g.

$object->dad->grandad->tell_old_war_stories();

...will invoke the method tell_old_war_stories in grandad which is an embedded object within dad, which itself is an embedded object in $object. The same goes for properties:

print "My girlfriend weighs this many pounds: ", $object->girlfriend->{weight}, "\n"; $object->girlfriend->{weight} -= 25; print "Hey, she lost 25 pounds, she now weigh this many pounds: ", $object->girlfriend->{weight}, "\n";

Simple as Pie!!

Note to previous users of NT Perl

Since the OLE Automation scheme has been completely revised, none of the former constructs have to be used. There is no need for MkOLEx, and there is only one OLE module for all OLE Automation objects (i.e. no need to use the module OLE::Word_Basic etc).