I have a peculiar problem to solve regarding office automations (word, excel and powerpoint)
Scenario -
Microsoft Windows 2003 office was installed on the windows server where the domino server is also running.
User clicks on “Export” button to export the Domino data to Excel or Word or Powerpoint accordingly over WEB.
As the agent is initiated on web, it runs on server and so the word/excel/ppt files will be created on server hard disk.
Problem -
The main problem comes when the agent creating office automation does fail. This causes the office process(word/excel/ppt) to still run on the server machine causing problems for others to export.
The administrator has to manually kill the process on server to initiate the process.
Solution (what I am thinking of) -
Initiate the automation class from the client itself and store the office file on client’s harddisk.
I know this is difficult as this needs to be done by agent and the agent when ran from web always runs on server.
So, could you all let me know the best way to complete this task.
The application is web, but the automation needs to be intiated on client.
If it is ie only then you could possibly use office web components using vbscript. You can use domino forms to get all the required data via WQO agents and populate into fields and access the values using vbscript. I had very effectively used OWC in some of my browser(ie only) based applications.
You don’t need MS Office installed on the server. Just Office Web Components need to be installed on the server. There’s a separate installation which you can download from the microsoft’s website. Also the browser need to accept to run activex objects…
It sounds like you may not be handling errors properly. For example, if the agent fails to finish creating the file because of something else in your code, your error handler should tell word/excel/ppt to quit.
For example:
If Not(wdApp Is Nothing) Then
wdApp.Quit(False)
End If