Avoiding Win32::OLE errors

esr has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a Perl script which creates/edits a Word document and then makes it visible for manual editing and possible printing. When the editing/printing has been done, the user closes the document and the Perl script detects this and continues with additional tasks. The code I use to detect that the document has been closed is as follows:

$mydoc = $word->Documents->Open($xfile);
$mydocnt = $word->Documents->Count();
while (($mycnt = $word->Documents->Count()) == $mydocnt) {
    sleep 5;
}
[download]

This mostly works fine but if the user closes Word rather than simply closing the file the above code produces an error which causes the Perl script to exit. The error messages say '"The RPC server is unavailable" in METHOD/PROPERTYGET "Documents"' and 'Can't call method "Count" on an undefined value' although the exact error messages are irrelevant for purposes of my question. The question is either: 1) How to detect when a document has been closed which also works if Word is closed instead? or 2) How do I prevent the obnoxious messages from terminating the Perl script?

Comment on Avoiding Win32::OLE errors Download Code

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Re: Avoiding Win32::OLE errors by rupesh (Hermit) on Dec 09, 2004 at 05:21 UTC
Have a look at this; might help: Trapping errors with Win32::OLE Cheers, Rupesh.	[reply]
Re: Avoiding Win32::OLE errors by maa (Pilgrim) on Dec 09, 2004 at 07:47 UTC
The MS Word VBA help files for this tells you why it's hard... the page is entitled "Using Events with the Application Object"	[reply]
Re: Avoiding Win32::OLE errors by esr (Scribe) on Dec 14, 2004 at 06:42 UTC
I'm relatively new to PerlMonks so I wasn't sure whether I should respond to the others' comments on this subject or not. The suggestions offered here were interesting and led to some useful information but did not solve the problem. However I did find a hokey way around this specific case. In this situation it appears that closing Word causes the $word object to point to invalid stuff and that is what seems to be causing the error messages. I experimented with various combinations and found that the following code bypasses the problem of the Perl script being terminated although there is still a warning message issued. The code that seems to work for this case is: `$icount = $word->Documents->Count(); $done = 0; while ($done == 0) { if ($word->Documents) { if (($mycnt = $word->Documents->Count()) != $icount) { $done = 1; } } else { undef $word; $word = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObjectord.Application') \|\| Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application'); $done = 1; } sleep 5; }` [download] As I say, it's hokey but it seems to work for this specific case.	[reply] [d/l]