Ruby on Windows

I've talked in the past about managing mail messages in your Inbox, and about saving email attachments to your hard drive. A reader recently asked about saving a mail message as a file on your hard drive.

JRuby 1.6 has just been released and, among the many new features, the JRuby installer for Windows now includes the win32ole library.

As recently reported, the NetBeans IDE team has decided to drop support for Ruby (and Rails) from NetBeans 7.0.

I have received many good suggestions from readers, with RedCar and RubyMine getting a lot of love.

But wait! What's that? It sounds like trumpets off in the distance... and hoofbeats.

Indeed, Tom Enebo is leading the cavalry to save the day, as he reported in the JRuby forum recently:

Good news for all those that would like to continue to use NetBeans with Ruby.

Thanks, Tom!

The NetBeans team has, unfortunately, decided to remove Ruby and Rails support from the NetBeans IDE:

FYI: In a recent Ruby Forum thread, Charles Nutter wrote:

This is good news for those of us who do a lot of work with the standard Ruby win32ole library.

My sincere thanks to all who are helping to make this happen.

FYI, Ed Howland has launched a new Ruby IDE discussion group:

So if you've got some constructive thoughts on what would be the ideal Ruby IDE, make yourself heard here:


David

I've written previously about automating Microsoft PowerPoint with Ruby. Someone recently asked how to use Ruby code to insert hyperlinks into a PowerPoint slide. Let's take a look now at how this can be done.

Setting the Scene

Let's quickly review the code that will launch PowerPoint...

require 'win32ole'
ppt = WIN32OLE.new('PowerPoint.Application')
ppt.Visible = true

...create a new presentation...

doc = ppt.Presentations.Add()

...add a new slide...

slide = doc.Slides.Add(1, 2)

...and insert text into each of the two textboxes...

slide.Shapes(1).TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Ruby on Windows"
slide.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Ruby on Windows: PowerPoint"

To fully understand the above code, you may want to read this article, if you haven't already.

ActionSettings and HyperLinks

OK, now we have a PowerPoint presentation with a slide containing two textboxes, and we're ready to make the text of the second textbox a hyperlink. Let's grab a reference to the TextRange object that holds the text contained in the second textbox (a Shape object) on the slide:

text_range = slide.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange 

To define the action that is to be taken when a TextRange object is clicked, we need to work with the first item in the TextRange's ActionSettings collection:

action = text_range.ActionSettings(1)

This returns the ActionSetting object that represents a MouseClick action. This ActionSetting object includes a HyperLink object...

link = action.Hyperlink

...and it is the properties of this HyperLink object that we will modify to result in a link to our website:

link.Address = "http://rubyonwindows.blogspot.com/search/label/powerpoint"
link.ScreenTip = "Click to go to website"
link.TextToDisplay = "Ruby on Windows: PowerPoint"

Our complete code looks like this:

require 'win32ole'

ppt = WIN32OLE.new('PowerPoint.Application')
ppt.Visible = true
doc = ppt.Presentations.Add()

slide = doc.Slides.Add(1, 2)
slide.Shapes(1).TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Ruby on Windows"
slide.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "Ruby on Windows: PowerPoint"

text_range = slide.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange 
action = text_range.ActionSettings(1)
link = action.Hyperlink

link.Address = "http://rubyonwindows.blogspot.com/search/label/powerpoint"
link.ScreenTip = "Click to go to website"
link.TextToDisplay = "Ruby on Windows: PowerPoint"

That's all for now, but feel free to post a comment here or send me email with questions, comments, or suggested topics.

Thanks for stopping by!