Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro

2017-07-07 02:10:07

Chapter 13 - Inter-Office Communication

Once you ve figured out the servers as individual applications, the next natural step is to get them talking to each other, or talking back to your FoxPro application.

It doesn t take long before you, your clients, or your boss comes up with the idea that you ought to be able to cut and paste between the cool applications you ve developed. After all, an interactive user can press Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to copy and paste between various Office applications. How hard can it be to automate it? Fortunately, it s not hard at all. We ll cover several ways to get data from one server to appear in another server.

The next idea that seems obvious to the developer is that the Office servers are wonderfully object-oriented, complete with their polymorphic properties, methods, and events. Events VFP allows you to run code on certain events; it might be feasible to do the same in the Office servers. Wouldn t it be nice to get the Office server to tell your VFP application when the user tries to save, print, or exit the document that your application so carefully opened? It s quite possible with VFP s VFPCOM.DLL utility, which binds the server s events to VFP procedures.

Категории