Word / Office ActiveX - Document Properties

[Pete.Wilkinson]

I wish to access the DocumentProperties attribute of a Word document, which I should be able to via BuiltInDocumentProperties or CustomDocuemntProperties on the main Document class, however ..

Looking at the class browser for my Word External Class, both methods/attributes are defined as returning a _document type, when it should be DocumentProperties ....

Further more my Office 11 External Class cannot even see the DocumentProperties and DocumenProperty attributes which I know exist!

Shall I raise both these as in issue?

[Bodo]

Looking at the type library (using OleView) both BuiltInDocumentProperties and CustomDocuemntProperties properties for the interface _Document (which the Document class implements) are defined of type "IDispatch*", which means "some COM object" - not "DocumentProperties" as you wrote.
In the OpenROAD class browser such types are shown with the name of the interface itself rather than just as ExternalObject or "IDispatch", but this is rather a nuisance.

In addition I can't find "DocumentProperties" and "DocumentProperty" attributes in the type library, which means that they don't exist (so OpenROAD is right about this).
Where do you get the information about their existence from?

[Pete.Wilkinson]

As I cannot get OLEViewer to work I cannot confirm what you say, and my knowledge only comes from what I can gleem from some other TypeLibrary Viewer I use, Microsoft documentation and of course Google! Plus looking at the VBA (that comes with Word) Object Browser DocumentProperties is there, honest

DocumentProperties Collection Object

BuiltInDocumentProperties Property

CustomDocumentProperties Property

[Bodo]

This is the difference between documentation and implementation.
Microsoft can document the attributes to be a certain type (e.g. DocumentProperty"), but the actual implementation could be of a more generic type - as long as they only use the documented type it doesn't really matter.
This is like defining a method for a userclass to return UserObject, but documenting that it retuns a Customer object - as long as you really return a customer object this should be ok (though it will probably require some casting wherever you use the method).

Anyway I opened the Object Browser in VBA (in MS Word) and it shows the attributes as following:
Property BuiltInDocumentProperties As Object
read-only
Member of Word.Document
Property CustomDocumentProperties As Object
read-only
Member of Word.Document

So, it's actually defined as "Object" which is exactly what I wrote - a generic COM object reference.
There is also no "DocumentProperty" class in the Word library.
But it can be found in the "Office" library.

So, what I did in OpenROAD 2006 is:
I added both "word" (Microsoft Word Object Library) and "office" (Microsoft Office Object Library) as extenal class libraries.
Having a look at the class browser it shows "builtindocumentproperties" as type "builtindocumentproperties" and "customdocumentproperties" as "customdocumentproperties".
This means that it can't determine the actual type of these object attributes.
But the "documentproperty" class does not show up - and I can't declare a variable of this type.
Why is that: oleview gave me the answer:
DocumentProperty is actually not a class, but an interface. The same applies to DocumentProperties

The OpenROAD's ClassBrowser only shows classes.
Therefore in order to work with their attributes/methods you have to use a class which implements these interfaces.

Hope this clarifies.

[Pete.Wilkinson]

you certainly have more of a grasp on the details then I do Bodo; all I know is that I should be able to do something like the following, but I cannot:

myDoc.CustomDocumentProperties.Add ( ... )

I suspect the issue is, is that DocumentProperties is defined/declared within the Office Library and not directly in the Word Library, though Word must surely inherit from Office?, and such code above would work in VBA. But as you say documentation is not always implemenation, and OR implementation differs from VBA implementation.

I have put the code into a Macro which I call via myWord.Run ( myMacroName ), which will surfice for now, I might yet put it into VBA dll, but to do it in OR would have been the prefered solution.

[Bodo]

What you should be able to do is:

declare
    methodname = varchar(32) not null;
    ...
enddeclare
{
...
methodname = 'Add';
myDoc.CustomDocumentProperties.:methodname ( ... );
}

[Pete.Wilkinson]

Fantastic stuff, not sure why it works, but it does!

Many thanks Bodo!

[Bodo]

As CustomDocumentProperties attribute is not defined as "DocumentProperties" in the COM library you can't directly invoke "Add" method on it - for the same reason you don't get the auto-completion offering when typing "mydoc.CustomDocumentProperties." in VBA.
The dynamic invocation works, because the compiler doesn't check if the method is defined for the class of the object - it can't do that as it doesn't know its name until runtime.
At runtime the method is just executed on the object - if the method is defined for the actual object referenced then it's ok - if not then a runtime exception/error would be generated.

[Pete.Wilkinson]

Further to this, I now really need to be able to access any existing document properties, so I am able to amend or delete. To do this I guess will I need some wrapper around the Office object or something? I'm well out of my depth here I'm afraid.