While attempting to "convert" or cast an SAPbouiCOM.Cell object into an SAPbouiCOM.Item object without success, I've come to the determination that Cells are NOT in fact "unique" objects in the UI API. My second hint to this was the fact that individual cells don't seem to have UniqueIDs. So, while they are technically "objects" in the traditional OO sense, they don't appear to fall under the category of SAPbouiCOM.Item objects, and don't seem to be able to be cast to it.
So, not being able to know what "type" of object a cell will be ahead of time, I wrote the following procedure to try to obtain some sort of value from any cell in a matrix. It's not pretty, and it's a little bit slow, and relies on error handling and try/catch blocks for situational handling... needless to say, I'm not really proud of it, but it appears to get the job done, 9 times out of 10. So here it is, if someone might find it useful someday.
''' <summary>
''' Throw an SAPbouiCOM Cell into this procedure to get its value
''' </summary>
''' <param name="oCell">A reference to the SAPbouiCOM.Cell</param>
''' <returns>A string value from the Cell</returns>
''' <remarks>On failure, will return nothing</remarks>
Private Shared Function getCellValue(ByRef oCell As SAPbouiCOM.Cell) As String
Dim sReturnValue As String = Nothing
Try
'Since we don't know what type of field a Cell may be, we need to try all of the most common properties to pull data from,
'one at a time, until we either have found one that provides data, or fail out and return nothing.
Try
'Try to just get the value directly as in the case of EditBoxes and ComboBoxes
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.Value
If sReturnValue = "" Then
'If the value is nothing, then try to treat it as a CheckBox/Option Button to get a value that way
If oCell.Specific.Checked Then
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.ValOn
Else
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.ValOff
End If
If sReturnValue = "" Then
'If the value is still nothing, then try a last ditch effort by using the Caption property
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.Caption
End If
End If
'Catch failures below as failures to cast the object as an EditText/ComboBox
Catch ex As Exception
'If that fails, try to treat it as a CheckBox/Option Button
Try
If oCell.Specific.Checked Then
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.ValOn
Else
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.ValOff
End If
Catch ex2 As Exception
Try
'If that fails, try a last ditch effort by using the Caption property
sReturnValue = oCell.Specific.Caption
Catch ex3 As Exception
Return Nothing
End Try
End Try
End Try
'Return the ReturnValue
Return sReturnValue
Catch ex As Exception
ErrorLog.AddEntryWithTrace(ex)
Return Nothing
End Try
End Function
