How can an Excel handle be shared?

mbailey

Member
Our company has developed hundreds of automations, many of which interact with Excel. This required developing our own Excel VBOs for actions not included in the built-in Blue Prism Excel VBO. A major problem is that actions cannot be called from any business object other than the one that opened the Excel instance without generating a dictionary error for an unrecognized handle. This means that actions tailored to specific use cases cannot be written without making the custom Excel business object really huge. We addressed this by copying all the common actions to several custom VBOs, then writing specific actions that were needed by groups of use cases. Unfortunately, the amount of common code between the different custom Excel VBOs has grown to the point where it is difficult to keep modifications synchronized between the custom objects. We want to be able to call Excel actions in different business objects to act against the same Excel instance.

Is there a method that allows an action in one business object to attach to or share the dictionary of the different business object that opened the Excel instance? If so, where can I find instruction to do that?

Thanks,
Michael Bailey
 

sahil_raina_91

Active Member
Our company has developed hundreds of automations, many of which interact with Excel. This required developing our own Excel VBOs for actions not included in the built-in Blue Prism Excel VBO. A major problem is that actions cannot be called from any business object other than the one that opened the Excel instance without generating a dictionary error for an unrecognized handle. This means that actions tailored to specific use cases cannot be written without making the custom Excel business object really huge. We addressed this by copying all the common actions to several custom VBOs, then writing specific actions that were needed by groups of use cases. Unfortunately, the amount of common code between the different custom Excel VBOs has grown to the point where it is difficult to keep modifications synchronized between the custom objects. We want to be able to call Excel actions in different business objects to act against the same Excel instance.

Is there a method that allows an action in one business object to attach to or share the dictionary of the different business object that opened the Excel instance? If so, where can I find instruction to do that?

Thanks,
Michael Bailey
Why not directly use the attach action present in the Excel VBO ?
 
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