[Development] ActiveQt Word automation and event-handling

[Nagel, Andreas]

Hello,

I try to use ActiveQt and COM-automation. I posted several questions to Qt-Forum and stackoverflow but nobody could give me an answer to that topic.
I seems that there is no community for ActiveQt which leads me to the assumption that that this library is not much used.

What I want to do is Word-automation and the first thing I did is to create wrapper-classes with the tool 'dumpcpp.exe'. That worked
and I could start a new word application, set it visible, create new document, etc. Everything worked fine, but when it comes to events,
it was a nightmare.

I found out that I could successfully connect to Events which have no parameters like DocumentChange(). Then the Slot is called.
All other events must be handles via the generic signal, because either I could not connect to the signal (wrong event signature) or
my slot was not called.
signal(QString<http://qt-project.org/doc/QString.html>,int,void*)

I don't know why it didn't work but the first thing I noticed were the different event signatures.

I want to show an example:

First of all, I connect to the generic signal 'signal(QString,int,void*)' to handle all event. In the first param (QString), you find the name of the event with full signature. In case of word, there is e.g. an event called
DocumentBeforeClose(IDispatch*,bool&)

...when I close a word document. I can see this event in the generic event handler. If i directly connect to that signal...
connect(word, SIGNAL(DocumentBeforeClose(IDispatch*,bool&)), this, SLOT(onDocumentBeforeClose(IDispatch*,bool&)));

...I get a message:

Object::connect: No such signal Word::Application::DocumentBeforeClose(IDispatch*,bool&)

I studied the generated code of the word wrapper classes and I found in the metadata string, that the signature is:
DocumentBeforeClose(Document*,bool&)

The same signature above is printed out if I use the QObjects metadata information to show all signals. If I connect to this event, there is no output on console (no error message) so I thought the connection was successful, but my slot is never called (it has no parameter just to make sure that there are no problems due to paramter conversion, etc)
connect(word, SIGNAL(DocumentBeforeClose(Document*,bool&)), this, SLOT(onDocumentBeforeClose()));
Even if this is working, then I don't know how to define my slot the get the two parameters.

By the way: All word events are fired 2 to 4 times, most of them 3 times. This is not by design from Ms Word because in Delphi all events are fired exactly one time - it
wouldn't make sense to get events more than one time because it makes it hard (and impossible) to define a workflow based on such events.

After each event was catched in the generic signal in the console there is a message, that there is no signal found, e.g:
Object::receivers: No such signal Word::Application::WindowActivate(IDispatch*,IDispatch*)

I don't know why ActiveQt tries to (re)connect (??) to all these events but this connect-call was not caused by me.

I faced the same problems when I use the low-level API of ActiveQt without any wrapper code!



My environment data:
- Windows 8.1
- Word 2013
- Qt 4.8.5

The same problems exist when I test it on Windows 7 and Word 2010.



My question is: Does/Did somebody use Word automation in ActiveQt and can explain how this works with events. Or is it just impossible to use ActiveQt and Word
due to internal bugs. The ActiveQt-examples didn't help because there is no information about event-handling and I didn't find any code examples for Word which
uses events.



Thanks for any help!

Best regards

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