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View Full Version : Automating Data Retrieval From Terminal Emulator (OutsideView) with VBA



pedroj012
02-06-2017, 05:21 PM
My company uses OutsideView, which I think is just a terminal emulator, letting us access a database. It's your basic blue screen with white letters. I want to create a macro that takes lists of numbers from excel and then inputs them into the terminal and reads the result back into excel.

At another job they used something similar to OutsideView called Attachmate, or Extra!, and there was a lot of documentation about how to automate that through excel. I can't find anything for OutsideView.

I do have access to OutsideView API documentation, which talks about all the methods available, and gives examples of these methods in .net, vba, and other languages.

In excel (through the menu) I tried to declare a reference to the DLL's associated with OutsideView, but it won't let me do that (Gives an error).

I'm trying to figure out how to use Declare Lib within the macro itself and reference the library, but I'm not sure if that's how I should go about it. Like, can I even use the library?

With Attachmate, you could reference the Extra! Dll directly. I'm worried that not being able to do that means I won't be able to automate like I could with Extra!, but seeing methods in the OutsideView API written in VBA makes me think there has to be a way to make this work.

Like can I just create an OutsideView System object and then start calling methods through it somehow?

I guess I'm feeling a little lost, and clearly I'm not an expert on this. Thanks for any help!