Get Value of a Matrix Cell

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.

”’

”’ Throw an SAPbouiCOM Cell into this procedure to get its value

”’

”’ A reference to the SAPbouiCOM.Cell

”’ A string value from the Cell

”’ On failure, will return nothing

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