Excel4apps Web ADI Investigation with Excel4apps Wands version Excel4apps Inc.

Transcription

1 Excel4apps Web ADI Investigation with Excel4apps Wands version Excel4apps Inc.

2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction Error Problem Description Cause Conclusion Next steps... 4 Page 2 of 5

3 1 Introduction This document sets out our findings regarding an issue running Oracle s Web ADI with Excel4apps Wands version 5. The issue relates specifically to Oracle s version of Web ADI that has Excel 2013 support when used in Excel Error When running Web ADI with the Excel4apps Wands Excel Add-Ins active an error displays at the end of the process stating Ambiguous name detected: BNE_TRACE. This error does not occur if the Excel4apps Wands Add-Ins are not active. 3 Problem Description In order to understand the root cause of the problem it is important to know how the Web ADI process operates in Excel. The sequence of events is as follows: 1. The option to create a Web ADI document is selected in the Oracle application inside the browser. 2. This downloads an Excel workbook (WebADI.xls) to the local PC which must then be opened to start the process in Excel. 3. Launching the workbook in Excel runs a VBA program which creates the Web ADI upload workbook. 4. This process involves a number of steps. Amongst others it: a. Creates a new Excel workbook which will house the Web ADI upload template. b. Formats a worksheet in the new workbook with the template input cells, rows, formatting etc. c. Injects a VBA form into the target workbook. d. Injects a number of other VBA modules and class modules into the target workbook. 5. The WebADI.xls workbook that you started with is then closed leaving you with the upload template ready to be populated. In the error situation what is in fact happening is that the VBA form, modules and class modules, that are supposed to be injected into the new Excel workbook that was created at the start of the process, are in fact being injected into the WebADI.xls workbook. So the process is injecting the code into itself rather than into a new workbook. This results in duplicate declarations of variables etc. which cause the VBA error message to be displayed. 4 Cause I have conducted an extensive debugging process of Oracle s Web ADI code to try and understand what is going wrong. I have identified a section of the Oracle Web ADI program which relies on a piece of VBA code which gets the active workbook in Excel (Set m_objdefaultworkbook = Application.ActiveWorkbook in class module BneBootStrap_SAXCH_Viewer ). The code is getting the wrong workbook in some situations. If I modify this code with a hardcoded update to point to the newly created workbook rather than the active workbook I can solve part of the problems that occur. Indeed Page 3 of 5

4 the Oracle developer s comments just before this line of code seem to indicate the potential for a problem ('-- we are assuming that one is created by now (big assumption)). So at this point I knew that the cause of the issue is that the Web ADI program is hooking the wrong workbook to inject the VBA code into. This is a result of it expecting the target workbook to be the active workbook in Excel at a certain stage in the program. Clearly this is the case most of the time. But for some reason when the Excel4apps Add-ins are active there is a chance that the target workbook is in fact not the active workbook at the critical moment. I proceeded by a process of elimination to remove code from the Excel4apps Add-ins until the problem no longer occurred. I was able to identify the specific code that needs to be present in order to cause the issue. I then created a new Excel Add-In which included just this code in order to test my findings. I removed all Excel4apps Add-Ins and loaded just this test Add-In and proceeded to run the Web ADI process and I was able to reproduce the error condition. The conditions that need to be present to reproduce the error are as follows: 1. An Excel Add-In must be active in the Excel session 2. The Add-In Needs to include Ribbon XML that adds a new Tab to the Excel toolbar. 3. The Tab entry needs to include the Id attribute 4. The Tab entry needs to include a getvisible callback which determines if the tab is visible or not. 5. My Ribbon XML in the example is as follows: <customui xmlns=" onload="onload"> <ribbon> <tabs> <tab id = "tabid" label="newtab" getvisible="isvisible"> </tab> </tabs> </ribbon> </customui> 6. The Add-In needs a VBA module which includes a procedure for the onload and isvisible callbacks. However these procedures can be empty. 5 Conclusion For some reason having Ribbon XML that includes a callback to determine the visibility of the component can alter the active workbook in Excel. There is, in my opinion, nothing incorrect about how we have implemented these features using the Microsoft Ribbon framework. It is Oracle s reliance on the target workbook being the active workbook at a specific point that is the root cause of this issue. 6 Next steps Unfortunately you will need to log a service request with Oracle and they will need to provide a permanent solution to this issue. There is nothing we can change in our application to Page 4 of 5

5 avoid the problem from occurring. You are welcome to provide this report to them and I can make my example Add-in available as well to reproduce the error. The only workaround is to disable the Excel4apps Add-ins before creating Web ADI templates. Page 5 of 5