Invoking Rubberduck methods from VBA or other COM-Aware programs

[DecimalTurn]

For VBA-Build, I was curious to see if it was possible to install Rubberduck inside a GitHub Action worker and run the tests inside a VBA project. The installation part worked, but as discussed in #5995, there is no way to access Rubberduck's method from the CLI at the moment.

However, looking in the code, there is currently this comment in TypeLibsAPI.cs:

Rubberduck/Rubberduck.VBEEditor/ComManagement/TypeLibs/Public/TypeLibsAPI.cs

Lines 15 to 35 in c417164

	{
	/// <summary>
	/// FOR DEBUGGING/DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES, ALLOW ACCESS TO SOME VBETypeLibsAPI FEATURES FROM VBA
	/// </summary>
	/// <remarks>
	/// VBA Usage example:
	/// With Application.VBE.Addins("Rubberduck.Extension").Object
	/// .ExecuteCode("ProjectName", "ModuleName", "ProcedureName")
	/// End With
	/// </remarks>
	[
	ComVisible(true),
	Guid(RubberduckGuid.DebugAddinObjectInterfaceGuid),
	InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsDual),
	EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Always)
	]
	public interface IVBETypeLibsAPI_Object
	{
	[DispId(1)]
	bool CompileProject(string projectName);
	[DispId(2)]

And this suggests to me that if the TypeLibsAPI was available in the release build or an alternative build, it would be possible to acess certain Rubberduck methods via VBA/COM directly. Then, it would be possible to write some kind of wrapper around the RunAllTestsCommand to return the outcome of the tests as a text file that could be used by the CLI.

eg.:

    Dim Output As String
    With Application.VBE.AddIns("Rubberduck.Extension").Object
        Output = .RunAllTests()
    End With
    ' Then write output to text file...

Does that sounds like a reasonable idea? I could try to work on this.

Side note

Also, while playing around with a debug build, I tried :

    Dim Output As String
    With Application.VBE.AddIns("Rubberduck.Extension").Object
        Output = .DocumentAll()
    End With
    Debug.Print Output

But I'm getting the error below while calling Output = .DocumentAll()

[DecimalTurn]

I managed to make a quick proof of concept for this here and the results are promising:

Taken from this GitHub action run: https://github.com/DecimalTurn/VBA-Build/actions/runs/14611847537/job/40991247991

[pflugs30]

Hi @DecimalTurn! I just came across this Issue today. I'm doing some similar work with MS Access, though perhaps in a different direction. Almost two years ago, I built an automated program that serializes Access database (including all their objects) to text files. My plan was originally only to commit these files to source so that I could get diffs across check-ins. However, now my interest is in "compiling" an Access database from source files which AI helps me generate. I also want to run the RubberDuck tests which AI creates from command line. That's what led me to this Issue and your post.

I don't see any traction on the Issue. Are you still actively doing things like this? If so, then I might be interested in collaborating. Our interests could align here... :-)

[DecimalTurn]

I don't see any traction on the Issue. Are you still actively doing things like this? If so, then I might be interested in collaborating. Our interests could align here... :-)

I'm assuming there is still intentions to bring this feature to Rubberduck. The PR I created for it is linked above in the thread, but wasn't merge because the original version was mostly a proof-of-concept and didn't respect IoC principles.

Doing this feature the right way will take some rework of the COM API that is outside of my expertise, but in the meantime, my proof-of-concept is available via my fork of Rubberduck and I even created a release for it.

This released version is also what I use for VBA-Build to provide the experimental feature of Rubberduck unit testing at build time.