Greetings Fellow Monks,

I am trying to build a tool to catalogue M$ Office documents in a spreadsheet, and I already know that it is tantamount to employing the Black Arts to attempt such a thing. The specific task I need to accomplish is to extract the "Title" property from the files -- this is a piece of meta-data that is somehow stored with each file. The tool that I have chosen is Martin Schwartz' seemingly excellent OLE::Storage modules. I say, "seemingly" because I have yet to get any of it to work, but from the documentation it appears to be capable of the task at hand.

The part I'm tripping over is this: the documentation refers throughout to properties (typically named $pps), but does not say how to generate a refence to such a thing.

It is clear how to get a handle to a document, as

my $Startup = new Startup;
my $Var = OLE::Storage->NewVar();
my $Doc = OLE::Storage->open($Startup, $Var, $file);
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which is pretty much verbatim from the documentation. Then I guess I would need to call a method on $Doc to read the properties structure from the document, perhaps as,

my @pps = $Doc->dirhandles(0);
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The dirhandles method is documented as,

@pps == $D -> dirhandles ($pps)
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so I'm assuming that $D may be the same as $Doc, and that the dirhandles method returns an array. Am I on the right track here?

I don't have the luxury of time to do trial and error with tese modules, so I'd really love to see some working example code, if such exists. The documentation refers to a couple of example scripts that come with the distribution, but these are LAOLA eamples, and don't use the OLE::Storage modules.

Thanks!

PCS