OLE Automation

OLE Automation is a standard, promoted by Microsoft, that applications use to expose their OLE objects to development tools, BlueZone Basic, and containers that support OLE Automation. A spreadsheet application can expose a worksheet, chart, cell, or range of cells all as different types of objects. A word processor can expose objects such as application, paragraph, sentence, bookmark, or selection.

When an application supports OLE Automation, the objects it exposes can be accessed by BlueZone Basic. You can use BlueZone Basic to manipulate these objects by invoking methods on the object, or by getting and setting the object’s properties, just as you would with the objects in BlueZone Basic. For example, if you created an OLE Automation object named MyObj, you can write code such as this to manipulate the object:

Sub Main
   Dim MyObj As Object
   Set MyObj = CreateObject ("Word.Basic")
   MyObj.FileNewDefault
   MyObj.Insert "Hello, world."
   MyObj.Bold 1
End Sub

The following syntax is supported for the GetObject function:

Set MyObj = GetObject ("", class)

Where class is the parameter representing the class of the object to retrieve. The first parameter at this time must be an empty string.

The properties and methods an object supports are defined by the application that created the object. See the application's documentation for details on the properties and methods it supports.

Accessing an object

The following functions and properties allow you to access an OLE Automation object.

Table 1: Functions and properties to access OLE Automation objects
Name	Description
`CreateObject`	Function Creates a new object of a specified type.
`GetObject`	Function Retrieves an object pointer to a running application.