How do I find out what the arguments/members of a given Word.Dialog are?

I can invoke them fine using the code from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ahzbkf8e,

and I can get some information on member names from "Built-in Dialog Box
Argument Lists" in the VBA help and from:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/macrosvba/WordDlgHelp.htm

But, as stated in the Word mvp article, "Microsoft listed the arguments you
can use but forgot to mention what the arguments mean or what values they can
take!"

Is there a way to get more information from somewhere, or to return the
argument lists of a specific dialog with reflection? I'm tring to invoke
specific dialogs with various properties 'preset' for the user...

Thanks,

Tobek

Hi Tobek,

You wrote:
> How do I find out what the arguments/members of a given Word.Dialog are?

> Is there a way to get more information from somewhere, or to return the
> argument lists of a specific dialog with reflection? I'm tring to invoke
> specific dialogs with various properties 'preset' for the user...

I don't think there is any hope of finding better documentation than what
they have in the VBA docs for the built-in dialog objects.

VSTO documentation states the following about the Dialog type:
"Interactions with built-in Word dialog boxes are through late binding, so
if you have Option Strict set to On or you use C#, you cannot access members
of the dialog boxes directly. You must use the Reflection libraries to
access dialog box members."

So, in C# you can't even access the properties of the Dialog object
directly. You can use Reflection in order to get all the members exposed by
an object of type Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Dialog. You can paste the
following code inside the ThisDocument class Startup / Open eventhandler (in
a VSTO Beta1 Word document project).
// Get an built-in Word dialog box.
Word.Dialog dlg =
this.Application.Dialogs[Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWordDialog.wdDialo gEditFind];

// Get all the members exposed by the built-in dialog.
System.Type t = dlg.Type.GetType();
System.Reflection.MemberInfo[] memInfo = t.GetMembers();

// Display a list of the names of each member in a MessageBox.
string str = "";
foreach (System.Reflection.MemberInfo m in memInfo)
str += m.Name + "\n";
MessageBox.Show(str);

You can also use Reflection to invoke a member method or get/set a property
on a Dialog object.
Hope this helps,

Apurva Sinha
VSTO Customer Solutions

Thanks for the reply, Apurva. I suspected that that would be the case.

As Paul Vick said in a recent blog post
(http://www.panopticoncentral.net/arc...2/10/7574.aspx), I'm not
masochistic enough to want to program VSTO in C# :-) So, I'll have some fun
translating your code to Vb.Net. Though I think I've already tried this, and
just got a list of the same methods of a dialog that I saw in the object
browser...

I'm sure that Microsoft must have internal documentation of the properties
of Word/Excel dialogs. Is there some reason why this cannot be made available
to Office developers?

Tobek

"Apurva Sinha (MS)" wrote:
[..]

Hi Tobek,

You wrote:
> Though I think I've already tried this, and
> just got a list of the same methods of a dialog that I saw in the object
> browser...

If you reflect on the object that is returned by indexing into the dialogs
collection, then you will see all the members exposed by that specific
dialog object. You can do this in VB or C# by calling GetType() method on
any object. Please look the code example below:

1. The following lines will get you a list of all the members exposed by the
specific type of Dialog (the EditFind Dialog in this case):

Word.Dialog dlg =
this.Application.Dialogs[Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWordDialog.wdDialo gEditFind];
System.Type t = dlg.Type.GetType();
System.Reflection.MemberInfo[] memInfo = t.GetMembers();

2. The following lines of code will only return the members exposed by the
Dialog class, as listed in the documentation you mention:

Word.Dialog dlg =
this.Application.Dialogs[Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWordDialog.wdDialo gEditFind];
System.Type t = typeof (Word.Dialog);
System.Reflection.MemberInfo[] memInfo = t.GetMembers();

You wrote:
> I'm sure that Microsoft must have internal documentation of the properties
> of Word/Excel dialogs. Is there some reason why this cannot be made
> available
> to Office developers?

Even I don't know the answer to that question! Maybe someone more
knowledgable than me can enlighten us in this regard. I suggest posting this
question on an Office newsgroup with your specific example of the lack of
documentation.

As far as programming Office solutions in C# is concerned, I was used to
C/C++ programming. For me programming in VB.NET would be masochistic :-) The
great thing is that VSTO (well .NET really) gives you the choice.

Apurva Sinha
VSTO Customer Solutions

Thanks for the clarification, but I'm still not quite there. Using your code
in number 1 (in C# for VSTO - <gasp>):

> 1. The following lines will get you a list of all the members exposed by the
> specific type of Dialog (the EditFind Dialog in this case):
>
> Word.Dialog dlg =
> this.Application.Dialogs[Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWordDialog.wdDialo gEditFind];
> System.Type t = dlg.Type.GetType();
> System.Reflection.MemberInfo[] memInfo = t.GetMembers();

I get a list of all of the different kinds of dialog boxes there are, i.e.
all the members of the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWordDialog
enumeration. What I was hoping to get was the members/arguments of the
specific dialog passed to the instance variable 'dlg'. In this case
(wdEditFind), this should be a member list like:

"Find, Replace, Direction, MatchCase, WholeWord, PatternMatch, SoundsLike,
FindNext, ReplaceOne, ReplaceAll, Format, Wrap, FindAllWordForms, MatchByte,
FuzzyFind, Destination, CorrectEnd, MatchKashida, MatchDiacritics,
MatchAlefHamza, MatchControl"

I got the above argument list from the VBA help file, as previously
mentioned. The main problem with that list of course is that the type of each
of these arguments is not given - although for many of them you can guess by
messing with the dialog itself in Word.

I'll see what response I get asking for this documentation over on one of
the Word VBA lists.

Thanks for your help,

Tobek