[Zope] m$ word question

Thomas B. Passin tpassin@mitretek.org
Mon, 22 Jul 2002 13:59:58 -0400


[Stephan Richter]

> Hi all,
>
> Is it possible to run M$ Word from within Zope? I've done a bit of
> searching but found suprisingly little, I would have thought this was
> something lots of people wanted to do?

Only in Windows using COM.

> Anyway, what I want to do exactly is call Word with a stream of data, to
> perform a Mail Merge. I'm converting some script that already runs in
> Visual Basic, is it possible to get a Visual Basic script plug-in for
Zope?
> Sorry if that sounds a little crazy, I'm still learning!

Well, but be aware that COM was not really written for a server-client
architecture. When I wrote the SilvaXML2DOC converter, we found that it
would
really hard to incorporate the code directly into a Zioe environment.


[Tom P]

I do not think that streaming to Word will be in the cards.  You should be
able to send discrete chunks or requests to Word via an external method,
using the COM extensions.  Error handling will probably be your biggest
problem, assuming you know how to write the VB to get Word to do what you
want.

Cheers,

Tom P