Mac Office 2011 VBA - calling a server script - macos

Question

I'm porting a large VBA project over from Windows to the new Mac Word 2011. It's actually going very well...almost all of the code is working.
My code needs to call scripts on my server. On Windows, I call the system function InternetOpenUrl to call a script and InternetReadFile to read the results returned by the script. For example, I call a script like:
"http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?param1=Hello&param2=World
and it returns a string like "Success"
What's the best way to do the equivalent on the Mac? Is using Applescript (via the vba MacScript function) the answer? I do that to display the file chooser dialog, but I can't find what the applescript to call an online script would look like. Or is there a better/faster way to do this?
Thanks in advance,
gary

Answer 1

You can try the URL Access Scripting library, which is a front-end for curl, or go to the script via a browser and reading the text through there.

Answer 2

I recently figured this out for making a call to a server to convert a user-defined LaTeX string to an image of the equation. The call is made through VBA via the MacScript command as:
command = "do shell script """ & pyPath & "python " & getURLpath & "getURL.py --formula '" _
& Latex_Str & "' --fontsize " & Font_Size & " " & WebAdd & """"
result = MacScript(command)
Which looks ugly, but this is just building the command do shell script /usr/bin/python {path to script}/getURL.py --formula '{LaTeX formula string}' --fontsize {int} {myurl} and passing it to the command. My Python script then uses argparse to parse the arguments sent to it, and urllib and urllib2 to handle sending the request to the server. The MacScript command read the stdout of my Python script and returns it as a string to result.
This guide on urllib2 should help you get the Python script up and running.
EDIT: Sorry, my answer was incomplete last time. The Python script I used to finish the job is below.
# Import the required libraries
from urllib import urlencode
from urllib2 import Request, urlopen, URLError, ProxyHandler, build_opener, install_opener
import argparse
# Set up our argument parser
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Sends LaTeX string to web server and returns meta data used by LaTeX in Word project')
parser.add_argument('webAddr', type=str, help='Web address of LaTeX in Word server')
parser.add_argument('--formula', metavar='FRML', type=str, help='A LaTeX formula string')
parser.add_argument('--fontsize', metavar='SIZE', type=int, default=10, help='Integer representing font size (can be 10, 11, or 12. Default 10)')
parser.add_argument('--proxServ', metavar='SERV', type=str, help='Web address of proxy server, i.e. http://proxy.server.com:80')
parser.add_argument('--proxType', metavar='TYPE', type=str, default='http', help='Type of proxy server, i.e. http')
# Get the arguments from the parser
args = parser.parse_args()
# Define formula string if input
if args.formula:
values = {'formula': str(args.fontsize) + '.' + args.formula} # generate formula from args
else:
values = {}
# Define proxy settings if proxy server is input.
if args.proxServ: # set up the proxy server support
proxySupport = ProxyHandler({args.proxType: args.proxServ})
opener = build_opener(proxySupport)
install_opener(opener)
# Set up the data object
data = urlencode(values)
data = data.encode('utf-8')
# Send request to the server and receive response, with error handling!
try:
req = Request(args.webAddr, data)
# Read the response and print to a file
response = urlopen(req)
print response.read()
except URLError, e:
if hasattr(e, 'reason'): # URL error case
# a tuple containing error code and text error message
print 'Error: Failed to reach a server.'
print 'Reason: ', e.reason
elif hasattr(e, 'code'): # HTTP error case
# HTTP error code, see section 10 of RFC 2616 for details
print 'Error: The server could not fulfill the request.'
print 'Error code: ', e.code