I'm working on an Excel plugin (XLL), which communicates with COM objects. So, I have to marshall between XLOPER and VARIANT. I've got most of this working, but arrays are definitely a pain. I need to support 1- and 2D arrays.
I imagine someone has already had to deal with this before. What's the best way to simplify dealing with VARIANT, SAFEARRAY, and XLOPER (and XLOPER12)?
I had to hand-roll my own marshalling code for this. There were no freely available libs to handle this. XLW is meant for wrapping your entire plugin - this was not an option for me.
In the end, it just took a lot of time, looking through the documentation for xloper and variant, and figuring out how to map them to each other.
For the curious:
arrays in xloper(12):
- .xltype is xltypeMulti
- .val.array is a pointer to an array of xlopers.
arrays in variant:
- .vt is VT_ARRAY | VT_VARIANT
- .parray is a SafeArray of variants
other tips with this marshalling:
- xltypeRef and xltypeSRef: use xlCoerce to look up actual cell values.
- integer values run the risk of overflow.
boost::numeric_casthelps with that. - string marshalling is annoying. xloper uses char, xloper12 uses wchar, variant uses bstr.
- Remember to free the buffers you allocate for your new xloper strings. Use xlbitDLLFree and xlAutoFree(12) accordingly.
- Template programming is useful for the xloper/xloper12 issue. Boost helps. _bstr_t also helps.
I use XLL Plus (costs) http://www.as-ltd.co.uk/xllplus/default.htm
There is also XLW (opensource) http://xlw.sourceforge.net/
and probably others I am not aware of
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4514679/how-can-i-marshall-between-xloper-and-variant