My job takes me a lot of different places and I work with a lot of different technologies along the way. Recently my team and I were tasked with a sort of ETL/reporting project involving some bizarrely formatted flat files, an Oracle database, and a couple Minitab macros. It was actually very straight forward except for one piece: automating Minitab.
I’m sharing the core piece of our development below in hopes that this will save a future dev some grief. I know that this looks very simple, and it is. Getting down to these few lines was not, I assure you, easy. A shout out to @xover9000 for doing pretty much all of this:
// the basic pieces var MtbApp = new Mtb.Application(); var MtbProj = MtbApp.ActiveProject; var MtbUI = MtbApp.UserInterface; // We want this to run completely without user interaction // Don't display messages or dialogs or anything // (learned about the last couple here the hard way...) MtbUI.DisplayAlerts = false; MtbUI.Interactive = false; MtbUI.UserControl = false; // Do the work // I don't know why we preface this with a percent sign but that's how mtb rolls MtbProj.ExecuteCommand(@"%C:\Path\To\YourMacro.mac"); // Macro run complete. Do whatever else you want or just quit // Note: .Quit is asynchronous which means if you really need Mtb closed // before you continue (e.g. before you run another macro), you need to // add your own logic to wait for it (also learned that one the hard way...) MtbApp.Quit();
Through those objects you do have access to all kinds of functionality if you need, but just for running macros those eight lines ought to cover it.
If you’re using a recent version of .NET, any errors that occur while running the above snippet will be raised as COMExceptions. The Application object has some error-related properties on it but in my experience their contents are copied into the COMException for you so that’s probably all you really need.
