Command Line Interface

[JamieG-UK]

It would be really useful to be able to specify the customUI XML file and images to be injected into an Office XML file.

The use case for this is that a multi-member development team need to collaborate on a VBA-enabled Office file. They need to be able to rebuild the project from source files (.bas .cls .frm) at the beginning of each coding session and then inject the customUI and images via automation.

Example CLI:

ribbonx.exe [CustomUI Folder] [Images Folder] [Office File]

Example usage:

C:\ribbonx.exe "C:\Test\CustomUI\customUI14.xml" "C:\Test\CustomUI\Images\" "C:\Test\myfile.xlsm"

This would be very cool!

[463]

I have seen you have started realizing this enhancement. Would it not be an general issue to add an export and import functionality first accessible in the menu structure? This would be helpful to allow e. g. a (git) revision management of the finally used xml and images. The CLI then is only part of a possibly automatization of the project management process.

[RickBrenner]

JamieG-UK’s CLI would support well the use case he describes, and, in addition, a use case that consumes a mountain of developer resources. That case is the 3R cycle: Revise-Replace-Review. For example, for an Excel workbook:

1. Revise the VBA or the CustomUI or both
2. Run the Command line yet again to install the CustomUI into the workbook, overwriting the previous version
3. Review the result by loading the workbook into Excel and exercising it.
4. Loop back to step 1

In this context, JamieG-UK’s CLI makes exploratory development and exploratory testing much more practical, which would transform the development and testing processes, thereby shortening time-to-market.