Chapter 15 - Wrapping Up the Servers | Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro

Chapter 15 - Wrapping Up the Servers

There s so much to the Office servers that it s hard to use them. Wrapper classes make it easier, as well as protect you from changes in future versions.

Each Office server provides a great deal of power, but their greatest strength is also their biggest weakness. To use them, you need to learn them. For each application you want to automate, you have to learn a lot. Despite the promise of polymorphism, working with more than one Office server means learning lots of exceptions.

To make matters worse, every time Microsoft releases a new version of Office, things change. New properties and methods are added, properties get additional values, and most important, methods take new parameters. In recent years, Microsoft has cleaned up its act considerably, so it s unusual for the order of parameters to change anymore, and it s not likely for a parameter to be required when it used to be optional, but once in a while, even those things still happen.

Sometimes, the changes in a new version are good ones and offer improved ways of performing an Automation task. But if you ve used a particular technique all over your code, you won t want to go back and change it in dozens or hundreds of places.

So how can you use Automation without having it become a full-time chore? The answer is to wrap the operations you use in Visual FoxPro classes.