The basic concept of the project is it accesses SharePoint, verifies a certain file exists, verifies the file is NOT locked by another user, and then, if those two conditions are met, excel opens the file up and does some stuff with it, then saves the file and closes it again.
The issue is at the point where the program accesses SharePoint and runs through the verification steps. Initially, my first crack at this was directly from VBA using SOAP, and, until Microsoft decided to downgrade SharePoint to 2013 from 2010, it worked quite well, meaning now, I'm into using Visual Studio and C# to accomplish the same thing that SOAP was doing in SP2010.
I've attempted implementing the code found here: http://www.vrdmn.com/2013/01/authenticating-net-client-object-model.html, however I can't get it to work. What I did manage to get working was the 2010 authentication model which pops up a browser window, checks for valid cookies, and, if it finds them, reads the cookies, otherwise prompts the user to log into SharePoint and then closes the browser and continues on.
public CookieCollection Show()
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.LoginPageUrl)) throw new ApplicationException(Constants.MSG_NOT_CLAIM_SITE);
// navigate to the login page url.
this.webBrowser.Navigate(this.LoginPageUrl);
DisplayLoginForm = new Form();
DisplayLoginForm.SuspendLayout();
// size the login form
int dialogWidth = Constants.DEFAULT_POP_UP_WIDTH;
int dialogHeight = Constants.DEFAULT_POP_UP_HEIGHT;
if (PopUpHeight != 0 && PopUpWidth != 0)
{
dialogWidth = Convert.ToInt32(PopUpWidth);
dialogHeight = Convert.ToInt32(PopUpHeight);
}
DisplayLoginForm.Width = dialogWidth;
DisplayLoginForm.Height = dialogHeight;
DisplayLoginForm.Text = this.fldTargetSiteUrl;
DisplayLoginForm.Controls.Add(this.webBrowser);
DisplayLoginForm.ResumeLayout(false);
//DisplayLoginForm.Show();
Application.Run(DisplayLoginForm);
// see ClaimsWebBrowser_Navigated event
//DisplayLoginForm.Dispose();
return this.fldCookies;
}
The problem comes about with the Application.Run(DisplayLoginForm). If I step through the code line-by-line, everything works fine, and I get the results I need within my VBA code. However, if I run the program with F5 (either by building it in Debug mode or in Release mode), Application.Run(DisplayLoginForm) kills the application (and Excel along with it) once the cookie jar (my term, and most likely not a computer term) has been examined for valid cookies.
You can see in the code, I attempted to use DisplayLoginForm.Show(); rather than Application.Run, however I kept getting null references to the file I'm trying to find, so that approach does not work either.
So here's the question:
How do I go about popping up a web browser (which is obviously set up as a windows form), look for the cookies, prompt the user if needed, close the web browser and remain alive long enough to return the appropriate values (file.exists and file.islockedbyuser.email, both of which are in functions called by the VBA and both of which work just fine) to excel, and then finish up the program without shutting Excel down in the process?