Dear Peter,
I'm glad that you find the package useful! Can you please explain a
little bit more about your code, because it's not obvious from your
description at which stage the problem occurs. Could you trace it with
the debugger, and/or possibly post here the piece of code that fails?
Thanks and best wishes,
Tomaz
------ Original Message ------
From: "PBKResearch" <pe...@pbkresearch.co.uk>
To: "Any question about pharo is welcome" <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Sent: 6. 04. 2020 19:15:16
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo
Hello Pablo (and Tomaž)
You asked for feedback; after a day of experiments, I have good news
and bad news.
The good news is that I have been able to navigate through my Outlook
Data File, find my way to an e-mail of interest and examine the fields
of interest. This means I am 90% of the way to my objective. All I want
is to get the HTML code from the message body and pass it to
XMLHTMLParser for further analysis. I found it not too difficult to
work this out; the fact that a COMDispatchInstance can display all its
internals in a playground page meant that I could work it out
interactively as a playground exercise. I am still discovering things
about the interface; I have only just found out that I can select an
item from a list by quoting its name as an argument, rather than its
number in the list. I am sure my clumsy code can be tidied up still.
I can get to the 100% point in the job by exporting the contents of the
e-mail to disk in HTML format, using the SaveAs procedure of the
MailItem object. I can then read it back from disk into the parser. But
this seems a bit clunky. The content of an HTML mail item is available
in the HTMLBody property of the MailItem, so I should be able to pass
it programmatically to the parser without going near the disk. This is
where I run into trouble.
In most of the cases I tried, this worked fine; I could display the
HTML body text as a WideString in the playground, assign it to a
variable and do whatever I wanted. However, for just one e-mail I
tried, as soon as I selected ‘Do it and go’ in the playground, a
message came up that the VM had crashed; the application closed,
leaving only a crash dump. I cannot find anything unusual about the
message that failed in this way, except that when I save it, it
produces a larger file than any of the others (just over 1MB, against
up to 300KB for the ones that worked). Could there be a limit on the
size of some internal buffer?
I thought it worth while mentioning this now, because crashing the VM
is generally undesirable. I can solve my problems safely using the
SaveAs route, so it’s not a problem for me.
Hope this helps; if you want more details, let me know. Overall I am
very happy with this library.
Peter Kenny
From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of
teso...@gmail.com
Sent: 06 April 2020 11:24
To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo
Hi Peter,
First, thanks to try to use Pharo-COM, that is great, I love to
have users for it and find it is useful.
Secondly, the Pharo 7 problem is an error I have introduced. It is
clear that some changes I have done to support the new version of UFFI
(the framework in Pharo to handle FFI calls) have broken the Pharo 7
version, so I will fix it to maintain compatibility.
It is great that you were able to make it work!
Cheers,
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 12:18 PM PBKResearch <pe...@pbkresearch.co.uk>
wrote:
Hello Tomaž
Many thanks for your patient explanation. I should have been able to
work out for myself how the Word test works, and indeed I realized
some of it when I came to shut down the Word instance and its two
documents. But it was late at night, and I should have packed up
before then.
My last test last night showed that basically I have cracked it for my
job of automating Outlook. I have been able to connect to my running
instance of Outlook, open my application and interrogate the names of
my top-level folders. From now on it should be just a matter of
understanding the MS documentation of the Outlook model.
However, all this is with Pharo-Com installed in a new Pharo 8 image.
I have no idea what went wrong with my first effort on Pharo 7. But I
shan’t worry about that – I shall gradually move all my bits and
pieces to P8. I shall try to work it out myself from here, but I shall
come back if I get stuck.
Thanks again
Peter Kenny
From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of
Tomaž Turk
Sent: 06 April 2020 08:04
To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo
Hello Peter,
If you look at the code in the Word test you will notice that the test
firstly
- creates a new Word instance,
- makes it visible to the end user,
- then adds an empty document to the documents collection with the
text "Hello from Pharo!"
- then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word.
After that, the test
- adds a new empty document to the documents collection with the text
"Hello from Pharo! Some additional text. ", this time as an array of
two texts
- it activates this second document (this imitates the end user's
window activation on the desktop)
- then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word.
If you look at the Task Manager, you'll notice that you have one Word
process with two open documents:
Namely, for each document Word creates a new, separate window - the
documents are not displayed in one "Word application window", but
separately - that's a normal behavior for some versions of MS Office,
and it happens also if you open several documents directly in Word.
So, there is just one Word instance.
'finalize' clears the references to the Word instance, it doesn't
close the program by itself. If you want to do that, you can send Quit
message to Word before you destroy the reference
(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.application.quit(method)).
Similar behaviour is with Outlook, here's one example:
https://www.excelcommand.com/excel-help/excel-how-to.php?i=124116
The calling among COM objects is asynchronous, and it's usually wise
to wrap it in error handling structures.
Please tell us how it goes.
Best wishes,
Tomaz
------ Original Message ------
From: "PBKResearch" <pe...@pbkresearch.co.uk>
To: "Any question about pharo is welcome"
<pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Sent: 5.4.2020 23:18:02
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo
Pablo - a final update before I close for the night. The Word test on
the pharo 8 version comes up green. The strange error message is
nowhere to be seen in any Pharo 8 runs. The result is not what I
expected; I finish up with two Word documents open, one with the
first message, the other with the two messages. I thought the
'finalize' command would close it down.
Anyway, it looks as if I need to switch to P8 to use Pharo-Com. I
shall continue testing tomorrow on P8.
Sorry for the late-night hassle.
Peter
--
Pablo Tesone.
teso...@gmail.com
