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23.5. Win32::OLE::Const

While browsing through the documentation for an automation object, you may have come across references to constant values. For example, if you're trying to save an Excel workbook to a different file format, you need to provide a file for- mat constant. Since the server documentation typically provides symbolic con- stants (e.g., xlExcel5 or xlTemplate), we need a way to access those from Perl. This is the purpose of Win32::OLE::Const, which imports the constants from an automation object into your script.

You can either import the constants directly into your namespace as subs that return the constant value, or you can have them returned as a hash reference with the constant name as the key and its value as the value. Here's an example of the former:

use Win32::OLE::Const ("Microsoft Excel");
print "xlExcel5 = ", xlExcel5, "\n";

This produces something like:

xlExcel5 = 39

Here's an example using the Load method to return a hash reference populated with the constants and their values (this produces the same output as the previ- ous example, of course):

use Win32::OLE::Const;

my $constants = Win32::OLE::Const->Load("Microsoft Excel");
print "xlExcel5 = $constants->{xlExcel5}\n";

Notice that, in both cases, we're supplying a regular expression for the name of the type library from which we want to import. Win32::OLE::Const searches the registry for matching type libraries and loads the one with the highest version number (you can override this by supplying the version you want). You can also specify the language you'd like. The parameters (for either Load or Win32::OLE::Const) are the typelib regular expression, the major version number, the minor version number, and the locale (LCID).

You can also provide the Load method with an automation object, which is then queried for its type library. Interestingly, the documentation notes that this seems to be slower than searching the Registry (though neither is really speedy with a large automation server like Excel). Here's an example of that:

use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const;

# Create an Excel application object
my $xl = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', 'Quit') ||
  die "Can't create Excel: ", Win32::OLE->LastError;

# Import the constants from it 
my $constants = Win32::OLE::Const->Load($xl);

Using Load (to get a hash reference for the constants) may be preferable to importing all of the constants into your namespace. Some automation servers pro- vide a large number of constants (the current version of Excel has some 900+), so importing them into your namespace can clutter things considerably.



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