Retrieve "Variant" data type from Enterprise Architect using DXL

Question

How can I use the DXL OLE mechanism to fetch a diagram's modification time from Enterprise Architect 12?

Details:

I want to retrieve diagrams from EA and integrate them as OLE object into IBM Rational DOORS 9.5. This is already working. I intend to compare the modification dates of the EA diagram and the DOORS object before retrieving the diagram to decide if this operation is really needed.

Problem is, EA provides a diagram attribute EA.Diagram.ModifiedDate which returns the diagram's modification date as data type Variant. How can I handle this within DXL? The result parameter for oleGet() can be one of the types string|int|bool|char|OleAutoObj. No structured type (which would probably be DxlObject). Neither string nor int parameters contain any useful data after the call -- just null values.

Test code:

OleAutoObj  eaRepository, eaProject, eaDiagram
OleAutoObj  eaApp    = oleGetAutoObject("EA.App")
OleAutoArgs autoArgs = create
string      guid     = "{729F140F-9DA4-4ff6-A9B2-75622AD1C22D}"

// connect to an existing EA instance
oleGet (eaApp, "Repository", eaRepository)
oleMethod (eaRepository, "GetProjectInterface", autoArgs, eaProject)

// call EA to a diagram which has this GUID
put(autoArgs, guid)
oleMethod(eaRepository, "GetDiagramByGuid", autoArgs, eaDiagram)
delete autoArgs

// access diagram attributes
string eaModifiedDate // DXL accepts [string|int|bool|char|OleAutoObj] only
oleGet(eaDiagram, "ModifiedDate", eaModifiedDate)
print "ModifiedDate = '" eaModifiedDate"'\n"

IBM's Support Team (commercial, available for paying customers) couldn't help and suggested to forward this question to the Service Team (for extra $s). Rather disappointing.

Answer 1

Try this one (just guessing :-)

OleAutoObj eaModifiedDate
oleGet(diagram, "ModifiedDate", eaModifiedDate)
if (null eaModifiedDate)
    print "no eaModifiedDate\n"
else {
    string diaDate
    oleGet(eaModifiedDate, "Value", diaDate)
    print "ModifiedDate = '" diaDate"'\n"
}

If that does not work then here comes the ultimate work around:

string err
string result

put(autoArgs, "SELECT ModifiedDate FROM t_diagram WHERE ea_guid = '"  guid  "'")
err = oleMethod (eaRepository, "SQLQuery", autoArgs, result)
if (!null err)
    print "ERROR: " err "\n"
delete autoArgs

print "result= '" result"'\n"

This will return a XML formatted string (!) which contains the date in the format you like.

Edit 1: Turns out that EA's SQLQuery is buggy and returns just the date. Since Perl deals with OLE Variants in a similar way I found this code snippet:

my $dia = $rep->getdiagrambyguid("{63EFF3FA-0D5C-4986-AC0A-C723D2F755E3}");
my $value = $dia->ModifiedDate->Value;
print $value->Date( 'yyyy/MM/dd' );
print $value->Time( 'hh:mm:ss' );

So the ModifiedDate is an ole-object and has a Date and a Time method. This should work with DXL too.

Edit 2:Now here's the ulti-ultimate work around even shipping around the cliffs of EA's bug ocean:

my $dia = $rep->SQLQuery("SELECT Format (ModifiedDate, \"Short Time\") AS T FROM t_diagram");

This will format the date as time string. Works for EAP (aka Mickeysoft Access) according to this page. Other RDBMS likely have similar functions.