Multiple Entries in Active Application Add-in(s) Dialog

[lovine...@gmail.com]

Hello,

We have an Excel-DNA add-in and in some scenarios we are seeing our add-in plus additional entries listed in Excel's Active Add-ins dialog..  These additional entries include the add-in's rtd server and an entry for our Custom task pane. 

Why would all of these be appearing in the 'Active Application Add-Ins"?

Also, on some user machines the add-in stays active while just the RTD portion is made inactive (it appears in the "Inactive Application Add-Ins list"). 

Let me know if you need further information.

Thanks!

[Govert van Drimmelen]

The extra add-ins are expected. For the Ribbon and CTP support, Excel-DNA registers and loads COM Add-Ins at runtime.

I'm not sure about the RTD server though - on my machine with a simple RTD sample it disappears from the list if there are no RTD topics active.

Are you perhaps doing a persistent registration with regsvr32 or a call to ComServer.DllRegisterServer() ?

It should be possible to consolidate the Ribbon and CTP support add-ins into one. But the RTD server interaction with Excel is quite different and not documented, so quite tricky sometimes.

Does it bother you, or are you just checking whether this is normal?

-Govert

[lovine...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the response.

I am calling DllRegisterServer(). 

My concern is that in some user scenarios the main add-in continues to be listed in the Active list while the RTD server is listed in the Inactive Addins list. This leads to N/A values for the user. I am trying to understand why just the RTD server would be flagged as inactive.

[Govert van Drimmelen]

There was a recent discussion where any RTD server would be "Inactive": https://groups.google.com/d/topic/exceldna/tHcZvlPI0A8/discussion

Are you using the RTD server directly (with =RTD formulas or calls to XlCall.Excel(XlCall.xlfRtd, ...))?

If so, then if a sheet opens before the add-in is loaded, it might happen that Excel fails to load the RTD server, and then marks it Inactive.

I think once Excel has failed to load a particular RTD server, it will not try again in that session. 

But anything I know about this comes from vaguely remembered observations. Excel's exact behaviour with RTD servers remains an enigma to me.

-Govert

[Dave Bettin]

We are using XLCall?  Are you saying if we do use XLCall it could cause the RTD to become inactive?

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[Govert van Drimmelen]

Hi Dave,

There a difference between calling into RTD via XlCall.RTD(...) and XlCall.Excel(XlCall.xlfRtd).

It's a bit confusing - in hindsight I'd have named things differently.

In the first case, you're using Excel-DNA's dynamic on-demand loading of the RTD server, which I suspect might be more reliable and should not lead to the Inactive RTD server situation.

In the second case, you're calling directly to Excel, which is equivalent to calling the =RTD(...) function from the sheet. For this the COM server must be pre-registered (maybe with regsvr32 or a call to ComServer.DllRegisterServer()). I'm trying to ask out how the RTD calls are made in these problem cases, so I can see if my theory of the Excel-DNA wrapper being more reliable holds. Since 'lovinexceldna' says they're calling DllRegisterServer(), I'm suspecting they might be in the second case, but would like to confirm that.

-Govert

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From: exce...@googlegroups.com [exce...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Dave Bettin [m...@davebettin.com]
Sent: 10 September 2014 08:41 PM
To: exce...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [ExcelDna] Re: Multiple Entries in Active Application Add-in(s) Dialog

[lovine...@gmail.com]

We are using XlCall.Excel...