Smallworld has found its voice

Bhimesh over at MagikFun provided an example of how to get Smallworld to talk.

Here's my attempt at getting Magik to talk in multiple languages...

_block 
  v << ole_client.create_object("sapi.spvoice")
  v.speak("ggooten abendd.  vilkommen")
  v.speak("good evening. welcome")
  v.release_object()
_endblock 
$

The German spelling is atrocious, but I found that you sometimes have to butcher the spelling to get the voice software to do a better pronunciation.

Imagine the possibilities now that Smallworld has found its voice!

OLE_Controller Monitor

Have you ever written Magik functionality that uses OLE/COM and wondered if you are sending :release_object() to all the ole_controller objects? Wonder no longer. Have a look at the ole_controller_monitor class I created recently.

This class allows you to start/stop/reset monitoring on the ole_controller class and report to you how many un-released ole_controller objects still exist in your monitored environment.

This is a great help in cleaning up OLE-based reports (eg., Excel, Visio, Word) and preventing the eventual OLE/memory-related errors that force a user to restart their Magik session.

API and steps to use the class are included in the file header.

Magik OLE Excel Reporting Performance Enhancements

I recently received a question about how to speed up Magik reporting to Excel using the OLE functionality. I you have ever used OLE from Magik to access other APIs you will know that it is a powerful but not overly fast way of connecting to 3rd party applications.

The questioner had indicated that they were writing data from Magik to Excel one cell at a time and then formatting each cell individually, too. While this is a logical way of doing a report it was taking a very long time to create a typical customer report.

My suggestions to improve data transfer and formatting performance were:

• If your report is basically a row report, then you can copy one row at a time onto the Windows text clipboard in Magik. Then you can use an OLE call on Excel to paste the copied text into a range of cells. Be sure that the copied text has a delimiter that Excel can parse on. That way you can pass a large amount of data from Magik to Excel with a single OLE call.

_block
 _constant delim_char << tab_char
 _local a_frame << smallworld_product.applications.an_element().top_frame

 # using a text output stream will let you cleanly create
 # a delimited string later on.
 _local temp_stream << internal_text_output_stream.new()

 _for a_record _over records.fast_elements()
 _loop
  # using OLE, set your cell range...

  data_list {a_record.attr1,a_record.attr2,a_record.attr3}
  temp_stream.reset()
  temp_stream.write_list_with_separator(data_list,delim_char)

  a_frame.clipboard_text << temp_stream.string

  # using OLE, do a "Paste" into the current cell
 _endloop
_endblock
$

• As for formatting: is there similar formatting for a row or column of cells? If there is, then keep track of how many rows or columns you have as you are copying/pasting the data into Excel. Then, once you have finished getting the data into Excel, format a range of columns or a range of rows or a range of cells that require common formatting. Again, that way you do the formatting with a minimum number of OLE calls
• Have you looked at the Smallworld Explorer “Export to Excel” functionality? I think that core code (4.0 SWAF) might make use of an Excel template.
• see collection_export_engine.export_to_excel