Damjan said:
Can anybody tell, how to sort Excel table with OLE automation?
Here's a somewhat verbose answer, that builds on the previous responses.
As always when trying to automate a script in Ruby, it helps to record
the macro. Then if you're using WIN32OLE, VBScript can usually be
translated directly into Ruby. The tricky thing is usually figuring out
what object to invoke a method against.
However, a naïve translation of the following, will not work:
Range("A1:C5").Select
Selection.Sort Key1:=Range("A2"), Order1:=xlAscending, Key2:=Range( _
"B2"), Order2:=xlAscending, Header:=xlYes, OrderCustom:=1 MatchCase:= _
False,Orientation:=xlTopToBottom,DataOption1:=xlSortNormal,DataOption2 _
:=xlSortNormal
Specifically, this translation fails:
require 'win32ole'
excel = WIN32OLE.new("excel.application")
wb =excel.Workbooks.Open("C:\\Spreadsheet.xls")
ws = spreadsheet.Worksheets(1)
ws.Range("A1:C5").Select
ws.Selection.Sort(Key1:=ws.Range("A1"), Order1:=xlAscending,
Key2:=ws.Range("C1"), Order2:=xlAscending, Header:=xlYes,
OrderCustom:=1, MatchCase:=False, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom)
There are at least three reasons this doesn’t work.
1. It turns out that "Selection" is a property of the Application, not
of the Sheet. We could fix this by substituting
sr = Range("A1:C5").Select
sr.Sort ..
But generally we want replace selection with direct references to a
range. In the case of sort, the usedRange method comes in handy. So we
start with something like this.
ws.usedRange.Sort...
2. VBA uses named arguments, but Ruby uses positional arguments only.
However, use can use associations to achieve very much the same thing as
named arguements. So
Key1:=ws.Range("A1"),
becomes
‘Key1’=>ws.Range("A1"),
That is, you put the keyword in quotes, replace the VB assignment
operator with the Ruby association operator, the value is entered as it
was, and each association is separated by a comma.
3. Finally, xlAscending, xlNo, xlTopToBottom are constants, which Ruby
doesn't know to translate. You may want to substitute actual numbers for
these constants .The following snippet will give you a complete list of
the translations:
class Excel_Const
end
require 'win32ole'
excel = WIN32OLE.new('Excel.Application')
WIN32OLE.const_load(excel, Excel_Const)
Excel_Const.constants.sort.each {|const|
value = eval("Excel_Const::#{const}")
puts ' '*4 + const + ' => ' + value.to_s
}
So a reasonable translation becomes
require 'win32ole'
excel = WIN32OLE.new("excel.application")
wb =excel.Workbooks.Open("C:\\Spreadsheet.xls")
ws = wb.Worksheets(1)
ws.usedRange.Sort('key1'=>ws.Range("A1") , 'Order1'=>1,
'Key2'=>ws.Range("C1"), 'Order1'=>1, 'header'=>1, 'OrderCustom'=>1,
'MatchCase'=>false, 'Orientation'=>1)
If you prefer to not use magic numbers, you can create a class something
like Excel_Extension.rb
class Excel_Extension
require 'win32ole'
attr_reader :excel
class ExcelConst
end
def initialize
@excel = WIN32OLE.new('Excel.Application')
WIN32OLE.const_load(excel, ExcelConst)
end
def xl(constant)
begin
excel_constant=constant.sub(/xl/, 'Xl') # allow constant to be xl
or Xl
return eval("ExcelConst::#{excel_constant}")
rescue
puts(excel_constant.to_s + " not recognized as an Excel constant")
return 1
end
end
end
And use it like so:
load ' Excel_Extension.rb'
ee= Excel_Extension.new
wb =ee.excel.Workbooks.Open(“C:\\Spreadsheet.xls")
ws = wb.Worksheets(1)
ws.usedRange.Sort('key1'=>ws.Range("A1") ,
'Order1'=>ee.xl('xlAscending'),
'Key2'=>ws.Range("C1"), 'Order1'=>ee.xl('xlAscending'),
'header'=>ee.xl('xlYes'), 'OrderCustom'=>1, 'MatchCase'=>false,
'Orientation'=>ee.xl('xlTopToBottom'))
