Smalltalk › Squeak › Squeak - Dev

Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

_‹ Previous Topic Next Topic _›

Classic

List

Threaded

14 messages Options

timrowledge

Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

I'm trying to find any pointers to COM (or similar) interfaces for driving Windows apps (things like getting the text out of a word doc etc) for Squeak. So far all the googling has found way too many unrelated things, so I'm clearly not finding effective search terms. I really don't care about automated floor-squeak removal tools... and I don't seem to be homing in on anything useful.

Does anyone have any pointers?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Why use one word when two polysyllabic agglomerates will do?

Jakob Reschke

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

Hi Tim,

What specifically are you looking for? The reference of a particular technology? An existing Squeak binding to any of them? Some guides that help to choose a tool to achieve a goal you have in mind?

The COM reference is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/component-object-model--com--portal

You might also like Microsoft UI Automation / Windows Automation API: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/windows-automation-api-portal

I don't know Squeak bindings to either of them, though.

Kind regards,

Jakob

Am Mi., 24. Juli 2019 um 21:51 Uhr schrieb tim Rowledge <[hidden email]>:

I'm trying to find any pointers to COM (or similar) interfaces for driving Windows apps (things like getting the text out of a word doc etc) for Squeak. So far all the googling has found way too many unrelated things, so I'm clearly not finding effective search terms. I really don't care about automated floor-squeak removal tools... and I don't seem to be homing in on anything useful.

Does anyone have any pointers?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Why use one word when two polysyllabic agglomerates will do?

timrowledge

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

> On 2019-07-24, at 1:58 PM, Jakob Reschke <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi Tim,
>
> What specifically are you looking for?

Ultimately nothing more than a way to extract text etc from Word docs or PDFs, that sort of thing; tables from spreadsheets too I guess.
VW has a whole COM/OLE system that certainly can be used to do the job, but simpler paths to the same end would be just fine by me.

> The reference of a particular technology? An existing Squeak binding to any of them? Some guides that help to choose a tool to achieve a goal you have in mind?

All of the above really; I haven't paid any attention to what microsoft does with stuff for a very long time so I don't even really know good search terms right now. Is COM still the thing or have they come up with some other acronym? Is there a completely different mechanism out there? Is there anything that might even be cross platform? Something chocolate favoured?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Meets quality standards: It compiles without errors.

Herbert König

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

Hi Tim,

my old brain squeaked "there was something"....

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3773may be a starting point.

I think it was used to access old technology (com, ole (reaaly, Windows
3.1)) through a more modern technology or the other way round.

Or it might be an alternative to use AutoHotkey to automate windows to
open all word docs and save them as rtf and excel to csv. If you touch
Windows that is. I went that way (by only working with rtf from Squeak
and manually open them in Word and save as doc) decades ago when I
needed to create Word quality reports.

Cheers,

Herbert

Am 24.07.2019 um 23:24 schrieb tim Rowledge:

>
>> On 2019-07-24, at 1:58 PM, Jakob Reschke <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> What specifically are you looking for?
> Ultimately nothing more than a way to extract text etc from Word docs or PDFs, that sort of thing; tables from spreadsheets too I guess.
> VW has a whole COM/OLE system that certainly can be used to do the job, but simpler paths to the same end would be just fine by me.
>
>> The reference of a particular technology? An existing Squeak binding to any of them? Some guides that help to choose a tool to achieve a goal you have in mind?
> All of the above really; I haven't paid any attention to what microsoft does with stuff for a very long time so I don't even really know good search terms right now. Is COM still the thing or have they come up with some other acronym? Is there a completely different mechanism out there? Is there anything that might even be cross platform? Something chocolate favoured?
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Meets quality standards: It compiles without errors.
>
>
>

Chris Cunnington-4

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

In reply to this post by timrowledge

I’d say looking for an API interface for this would be more trouble than it’s worth.
The simplest thing I can think of is to get the content you want into your OS's clipboard buffer. I think Squeak can access that directly. I think Levente added that capability.
Another way is one I’m trying to do. Copy the contents from a PDF. Save to another file. Import that content with FileStream readOnlyFileNamed:. I’m exploring String regex:matchesDo: to sort the content. I have to say that since my regex-fu is weak, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.
I imagine the VW solution has a nice set of tools to extract information. I imagine that’s precisely what we don’t have in Squeak. #regex:matchesDo: is about as sophisticated as I can suggest on that score. Like yourself, I’d be happy to hear other people’s ideas on this.

FWIW,
Chris

> On Jul 24, 2019, at 5:24 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 2019-07-24, at 1:58 PM, Jakob Reschke <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> What specifically are you looking for?
>
> Ultimately nothing more than a way to extract text etc from Word docs or PDFs, that sort of thing; tables from spreadsheets too I guess.
> VW has a whole COM/OLE system that certainly can be used to do the job, but simpler paths to the same end would be just fine by me.
>
>> The reference of a particular technology? An existing Squeak binding to any of them? Some guides that help to choose a tool to achieve a goal you have in mind?
>
> All of the above really; I haven't paid any attention to what microsoft does with stuff for a very long time so I don't even really know good search terms right now. Is COM still the thing or have they come up with some other acronym? Is there a completely different mechanism out there? Is there anything that might even be cross platform? Something chocolate favoured?
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Meets quality standards: It compiles without errors.
>
>
>

timrowledge

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

In reply to this post by Herbert König

> On 2019-07-24, at 2:47 PM, Herbert König <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi Tim,
>
> my old brain squeaked "there was something"....
>
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3773may be a starting point.

That looks pretty good except for the fact that the 'saltypickle.com' site is dead and gone :-(

anybody got a copy of any related info?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Paul DeBruicker

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

In reply to this post by timrowledge

There are a few things mentioned in these threads:

http://forum.world.st/Excel-binding-td4794745.html
http://forum.world.st/Tabular-XLSX-import-td4840652.html
http://forum.world.st/MSOffice-DOCX-generation-td4841528.html

this:

https://github.com/VincentBlondeau/Tabular

and:

http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/COM.html/Overview (no public code but maybe
Torsten has it somewhere)

timrowledge wrote

> I'm trying to find any pointers to COM (or similar) interfaces for driving
> Windows apps (things like getting the text out of a word doc etc) for
> Squeak. So far all the googling has found way too many unrelated things,
> so I'm clearly not finding effective search terms. I really don't care
> about automated floor-squeak removal tools... and I don't seem to be
> homing in on anything useful.
>
> Does anyone have any pointers?
>
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge;

> tim@

> ; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Why use one word when two polysyllabic agglomerates will do?

--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Dev-f45488.html

timrowledge

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

In reply to this post by timrowledge

> On 2019-07-24, at 3:02 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 2019-07-24, at 2:47 PM, Herbert König <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> my old brain squeaked "there was something"....
>>
>> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3773may be a starting point.
>
> That looks pretty good except for the fact that the 'saltypickle.com' site is dead and gone :-(
>
> anybody got a copy of any related info?

The wayback machine has some stuff but only up to release 5, but SM claims a release 8 was added at some point.

Ooh, here's something plausibly related -
MCHttpRepository
location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/AT'
user: ''
password: ''
is Vaidotas Didzbalis' batch job runner project and includes a copy of some version of dotNetBridge. I wonder if it'll be friendly?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: L: Lie!

timrowledge

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

> On 2019-07-24, at 3:17 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> The wayback machine has some stuff but only up to release 5, but SM claims a release 8 was added at some point.

Just for the record I copied the wayback machine's info to http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1489

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Has nothing to say, but delights in saying it.

frank.lesser

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

In reply to this post by timrowledge

Hi Tim,
You might have a look at Dolphin Smalltalk - it is MIT and has a tight COM /
Automation integration
It is on GitHub and I have forked it on my GitHub,
Frank

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Squeak-dev [mailto:[hidden email]] Im
Auftrag von tim Rowledge
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 25. Juli 2019 00:17
An: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

> On 2019-07-24, at 3:02 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 2019-07-24, at 2:47 PM, Herbert König <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> my old brain squeaked "there was something"....
>>
>> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3773may be a starting point.
>
> That looks pretty good except for the fact that the 'saltypickle.com'
> site is dead and gone :-(
>
> anybody got a copy of any related info?

The wayback machine has some stuff but only up to release 5, but SM claims a
release 8 was added at some point.

Ooh, here's something plausibly related - MCHttpRepository
location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/AT'
user: ''
password: ''
is Vaidotas Didzbalis' batch job runner project and includes a copy of some
version of dotNetBridge. I wonder if it'll be friendly?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: L: Lie!

timrowledge

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

Thanks for the suggestions folks. Looks like several options, though all a bit in need of work.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Calling her stupid would be an insult to stupid people.

frank.lesser

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

This link maybe usefull for the specific case you want
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-developer/automa
te-excel-from-c

You can create a standalone DLL from it and then create C-FFI for squeak for
the specific functions you need.
Since the functions are in C++ you need to wrap them with extern "C"
And to export them you need __declspec(dllexport) in the function signature.

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Squeak-dev [mailto:[hidden email]] Im
Auftrag von tim Rowledge
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 25. Juli 2019 21:02
An: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

Thanks for the suggestions folks. Looks like several options, though all a
bit in need of work.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful random
insult:- Calling her stupid would be an insult to stupid people.

Levente Uzonyi

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

In reply to this post by timrowledge

Hi Tim,

If you have specific tasks, you may as well try to write a program in
another language (PowerShell, C#, a simple .bat file, etc), and just
execute that from Squeak with OSProcess or ProcessWrapper.

Levente

On Wed, 24 Jul 2019, tim Rowledge wrote:

> I'm trying to find any pointers to COM (or similar) interfaces for driving Windows apps (things like getting the text out of a word doc etc) for Squeak. So far all the googling has found way too many unrelated things, so I'm clearly not finding effective search terms. I really don't care about automated floor-squeak removal tools... and I don't seem to be homing in on anything useful.
>
> Does anyone have any pointers?
>
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Why use one word when two polysyllabic agglomerates will do?

timrowledge

Re: Squeak interface to microsoft app automation?

> On 2019-07-25, at 1:59 PM, Levente Uzonyi <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi Tim,
>
> If you have specific tasks, you may as well try to write a program in another language (PowerShell, C#, a simple .bat file, etc), and just execute that from Squeak with OSProcess or ProcessWrapper.

There is that; and if there is an actual purchasable product that does the job it would save so much hassle. Though the dll path Frank suggested has some benefits as well, other than the idea of having to create a damn dll....

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Sep 19th ; talk like a pirate day - http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html