Tuesday 1 June 2004

Automating Excel with C# II - unexpected dialogs

Opening files from C# occasionally results in the app (Excel, for example) opening an unexpected dialog box (such as "Name Conflict - Name cannot be the same as a built-in name. Old name: Print_Area New Name: ________".)
AFAICT there's no parameter in the Application.Workbooks.Open() method that I can use to auto-dismiss this dialog, so I need to address it some other way.

A simple answer appears to be the
SendKeys Class
which I 'discovered' via this MSDN article: HOWTO: Dismiss a Dialog Box Displayed by an Office Application with Visual Basic.

I haven't actually implemented it yet (and even if i do send an 'ESCAPE' sequence to cancel the dialog, I still won't be able to open the file. BUT at least it won't hang/wait forever for user input that is never coming. Plus, (hopefully) sendint 'ESCAPE' will also deal with some other (as yet unknown) dialogs that might appear...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.