Prevent Login Dialog Box Popup In EssVConnect

Question

Using VBA code to automate worksheets. Our site updates and switches servers about every 2 hours. Code works great when 'server' is up but when switched and we don't know which one is active, the EssVConnect pops up the Login Dialog box requiring us to switch server names and press OK. This means it is not automated. We want to prevent the box from appearing and get a bad return code instead so we can cycle through all the servers until we find one that is active. Documentation implies it will do this. We have tried setting all messages off (EssVSetGlobalOption(5, 4)) but that does not seem to work for the dialog box. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I am trying to remember if there are any issues and I think there is.. If I remember correctly, the EsbInit will not do what you want if called from within Excel VBA when the Essbase add-in is loaded because the C API used within the Excel add-in has already initialized the API with the wrong setting. You could try it..
Further, the result of EsbAutoLogin is to get an context handle (hCtx). The problem is, then, that you can't use that context handle to do Excel add-in operations. The opposite situation, where you can get the hCtx from a worksheet connected to Essbase is not only possible but is the recommended way to combine the VB API with the Excel add-in. Look at the GetHctxFromSheet function to see how to use that capability.
The only solution I can think to do what you want to do is to create an ActiveX EXE in VB 6 and have that ActiveX EXE call the EsbInit, etc and validate the server you need to login at a specific time. As it runs in a separate process and loads the Essbase API dlls at your command (EsbInit), you can control everything there. You can then use the CreateObject command in VBA to instance the object and call methods on it; your method will check the login for a specific server can could return the appropriate error message for you so you could validate which server is currently available and then call that server in your EssVConnect call.
Tim Tow
Oracle ACE
Applied OLAP, Inc