Re: Customizing formula builder

[Govert van Drimmelen]

Hi Farhan,

Your plan 2. will be hard to make work. Mixing Excel-DNA and VSTO in
one add-in is not really possible.

However, you could certainly use the Windows Forms designer in Visual
Studio to create forms that you display from your Excel-DNA add-in,
either as a pop-up window or as part of a Custom Task Pane. So using
the designer would apply to your option 1 too.

Depending on the complexity of your function arguments, you could
probably make something on a Ribbon that does this too - some text
boxes and dropdowns and a button to insert the function. I have no
experience doing this myself.

There is another option I should mention again here - using the dialog
support in the C API. This is tricky to make work - I posted some
pointers in the earlier discussion here:
https://groups.google.com/group/exceldna/browse_frm/thread/296059b2993bd468
One advantage of the C API dialogs is that you get a refedit control
that allows the users to point to and select a sheet region, just like
the regular function wizard.

-Govert


On Jun 29, 10:37 pm, Farhan Ahmed <Far...@ycharts.com> wrote:
> Can you please share tips on how you accomplished this?
>
> I'm specifically looking for guidance on how to create a customized UI for
> the user to enter the parameters. If I understand correctly, there are a
> few options:
>
>    1. Write UI code (using Windows.Forms) from within the ExcelDNA add-in.*Nikee - Is this what you are doing?
>    *
>    2. Use VSTO to create a COM-addin that implements the UI (can use the
>    designer from within VS, which is nice) and then have the Excel Addin talk
>    to it somehow. *I am trying this strategy but am stuck trying to get the
>    ExcelDNA add-in to talk to the VSTO add-in. Any guidance here?*
>    3. Use the Custom UI interfaces in ExcelDNA to do everything. Not sure
>    how flexible this is
>
> Any others I am missing?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Friday, June 29, 2012 12:15:01 PM UTC-5, Nikee wrote:
>
> > I have little bit similar situation; where I want to give Wizard to users
> > where they will select input parameters and values for each of parameters.
> > And this wizard will be available through one of the ExcelCommand which
> > will invoke WinForm; where user can select their options and then that data
> > will be pasted on current sheet. Which will become driver for calling
> > ExcelFunctions... Similar to Bloomberg add in...
>
> > I just though of sharing this; I would appreciate if you guys share your
> > experience and pros/cons of this approach
>
> > On Friday, June 29, 2012 11:22:19 AM UTC-4, Farhan Ahmed wrote:
>
> >> Has anyone here tried customizing the formula builder to provide the user
> >> options (e.g. drop down menu) for possible parameter choices?
>
> >> I have one generic function that takes a "code" as a parameter that tells
> >> the function what to compute. I could define a UDF per code, but it would
> >> explore pretty quickly (I have over 900 codes right now), so I'm trying to
> >> figure out how to assist the user in choosing the right codes through the
> >> formula wizard.
>
> >> Any ideas or suggestions are welcome.
>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Farhan

[Farhan Ahmed]

Thanks Govert.

Regarding option (2), what if I have two add-ins (two DLLs) - one developed in VSTO that implements the UI and provides interfaces to display the UI, corresponding get/set functions etc. and the other developed using Excel DNA that implements the UDF.

Would it be possible to invoke the VSTO add-in functions from the Excel DNA add-in? Conversely, would it be possible to invoke the UDFs in the Excel DNA add-in from the VSTO add-in?

Thanks,

Farhan

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[Govert van Drimmelen]

VSTO has some useful high-level wrappers for interacting with ribbon
interfaces more easily. I don't think it offers anything else for UI
customization that you can't do as easily with Excel-DNA.

> Would it be possible to invoke the VSTO add-in functions from the Excel DNA add-in?

I'm not sure - it will probably be quite hard.

> Conversely, would it be possible to invoke the UDFs in the Excel
> DNA add-in from the VSTO add-in?

Yes, by calling via COM as
myResult = Application.Run("MyFunction", Myparam)


-Govert

> >https://groups.google.com/group/exceldna/browse_frm/thread/296059b299...