15.3.1. Background

OLE 2.0 replaced DDE with COM as the underlying communication method. Using OLE 2.0, you can now paste an Excel spreadsheet right into a Word document and edit the Excel data inline. Using OLE 2.0, the controller can pass complex messages to the COM server. For our examples, the controller will be our PHP script, and the COM server will be one of the typical MS Office applications. In the following sections, we will provide some tools for approaching this type of integration.

<?php
 $wp= new COM("Word.Application") or die ("Cannot open Word");
 $wp->visible=1;
 $wp->Documents->Add( );
  
 $wp->Selection->Typetext("Hello, world.");
?>

15.3.2. PHP Functions

An object of the COM class represents a connection to a COM server:

$word = new COM("Word.Application") or die("Cannot start MS Word");

$vrows = new VARIANT(0, VT_I4|VT_BYREF);

This creates a reference (VT_BYREF) to a 32-bit integer (VT_I4) with an initial value of 0. PHP can pass strings and numbers to COM servers automatically, but VARIANT COM types are required whenever you need to pass arguments by reference.

Selection.TypeText Text:="This is a test"

The same line in PHP is:

$word->Selection->Typetext("This is a test");

It is important to note two quirks in PHP's present COM support. First, you cannot pass parameters in the middle of an object method. So instead of writing a method as:

$a->b(p1)->c(p2) 

you must break up the method as:

$tmp=$a->b(p1);$tmp->c(p2);

Second, PHP is unaware of default parameters from Microsoft OLE applications such as Word. This simply means that you must explicitly pass all values to the underlying COM object.

15.3.3. Determining the API

15.3.4. Completing a Word Document

Figure 15-4. A sample invoice created with Microsoft Word

To place a bookmark, simply open an existing document, place the cursor in the desired location, and select Insert Bookmark. In the pop-up window, type in a name for the bookmark and press the Add button. Create bookmarks on the customer address line and in the delivery, item, and total fields. The names of those bookmarks should be customer, delivery, item, and total, respectively.

To move to a bookmark directly in PHP, we can use:

$word->Selection->Goto(what, which, count, name);

Using Word's macro language to determine the desired parameters for this method, we find that what requires the value wdGoToBookmark and that name refers to the name that we gave to our bookmark. With a little digging through Microsoft documentation, we also find that count indicates which instance of the bookmark in the document and that which is a navigational parameter, of which our desired value is wdGoToAbsolute.

Rather than do the positioning from PHP, though, we can create a macro to perform the find directly:

Sub BkmkCustomer( )
    Selection.GoTo What:=wdGoToBookmark, Name:="customer"
End Sub

This macro, which we've named BkmkCustomer, places the cursor at the bookmark named customer. Using this macro directly avoids any potential errors introduced in passing multiple parameters from PHP to Word. The PHP COM method for this is:

$word->Application->Run("BkmkCustomer");

We can repeat this process for each named bookmark in the invoice.

To reduce the number of bookmarks required, we can create a Word macro for moving to the next cell in a table:

Sub NextCell( )
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCell
End Sub

Now we can complete the invoice with data we get from an HTML form. We also want to print the form, though.

If we only wanted to save an electronic copy, it would be as simple as:

$word->ActiveDocument->SaveAs("c:/path/to/invoices/myinvoice.doc");

This has the side effect of setting the ActiveDocument->Saved flag to True, which lets us close the application without being prompted to save the modified invoice.

If we want to print the document, there are three steps: print, mark the document as saved so we can quit without a dialog box, then wait until the printing has finished. Failure to wait means the user will see a "Closing this application will cancel printing" warning. Here's the code for doing this:

$word->Application->Run("invoiceprint");
  
$word->Application->ActiveDocument->Saved=True;
while($word->Application->BackgroundPrintingStatus>0){sleep (1);}

In this code, we've created a macro, InvoicePrint, with our desired printer settings. Once we call the macro, we loop until the value of BackgroundPrintingStatus is set to 0.

15.3.5. Reading and Writing Excel Files

You can read the value in a cell with this function:

function excel_read_cell($wkb,$sheet,$c) {
  $sheets = $wkb->Worksheets($sheet); 
  $sheets->activate;                  
  $selcell = $sheets->Range($c);
  $selcell->activate;
  return $selcell->value;
}