Write Cell Background Colour

[amallison]

In Scribe we can read the Excel cell's background colour. Can we 'Write' the colour to format a cell?

Edited June 16, 2020 by amallison

[sean360Works]

Hello,

It is possible to change the background color of a cell. To format the background color of a cell, you need to specify three arguments in the ScribeDocWriteValue call:
1st: cell name
2nd: color
3rd: "background=true"

To change the background color of cell H4 to green, you would call ScribeDocWriteValue( "H4" ; "green" ; "background=true").

[bwsmith]

How does this work with the new script step? The docs for scribe all show the syntax above, but the script step will not accept semi-colons in the "Value" section of the script.

[sean360Works]

Hello,

You will not be able to pass in additional key-value pair parameters into ScribeDocWriteValue as a script step. If you want to pass in more parameters, please use ScribeDocWriteValue as a function instead.

[djlane]

Hi Sean,

 

How do I do this : "use ScribeDocWriteValue as a function instead" ?

 

thanks

 

[sean360Works]

Hello,

In FileMaker, you can use functions where you can specify a Calculation. Typically, users implement the function in a Set Variable script step so that they can trap for errors during scripting---our functions will return 1 on success and "ERROR" if the call fails---or for retrieving information like file paths, depending on what the function is designed to do.

By calling the plug-in function instead of the script step, you will be able to add additional arguments to the function call. For example, you can call ScribeDocWriteValue() with a list of arguments to write an image to a file at a specific position and with specific dimensions. If you wanted to write an image stored in container field MyTable::MyImage to the first slide of a loaded powerpoint file at coordinates (100,200), set the image width to 300px and the height to 400px, you would call ScribeDocWriteValue inside of a Set Variable script step as follows:

Set Variable [ $result ; ScribeDocWriteValue("1"; MyTable::MyImage;"x=100";"y=200";"width=300";"height=400") ]

If the call is successful, variable $result will have value 1. 

Let me know if you have other questions.

[djlane]

Hi Sean,

Thank you for that. It works, but I'm having an issue.

If I try to change the background color of a cell that contains a value, I get a Java Null Pointer Exception Error

It works fine if the target Excel cell is empty.

It also works fine in your demo file - I can change the background color of any cell no problem.

See below image - B17 is OK because it's empty, C17 is not.

Any idea what might be causing this ?

thanks

david

 

 

[sean360Works]

Hi David,

Could you please download and install the latest store build of Scribe to see if that resolves that behavior. I reviewed previous support tickets, and we resolved a similar issue recently where processing Excel and Word documents produced a NullPointerException. This version of Scribe is 4.0726, and can be downloaded from our webstore by going to the link below and clicking "Download current version".

https://360works.com/filemaker-pdf-plugin/

If you are running the latest build of Scribe and are producing that NullPointerException, could you please locate the plug-in log file and email it to [email protected] along with instructions on how you produced that error? You can reference our documentation at the link below to locate the plug-in log file.

http://docs.360works.com/index.php/Where_to_find_logs

If you have other questions, please email them to [email protected] and we can reply to you more promptly through our ticketing service.

[djlane]

Resolution : It's a bug in this release of scribe, fixed in V5