Rebuilding the vbaProject.bin

[dweedul]

Would it be possible to reverse part of the process used in the extract-macros code to rebuild the vbaProject.bin file within a new file.

I'm looking at this as a way to easily allow git versioning of the code and settings for a vba project.

[unixfreak0037]

I'm not sure what you man by this. Can you elaborate?

[dweedul]

Currently, you can extract the code modules from the vbaProject.bin. I was curious if the process in the --extract macros code could be used to piece together the streams necessary to rebuild the binfile from the extracted files.

I currently have an excel addin that I wrote that does most of this, but it gets cumbersome when I have to load code back into the project.

A script that could do that recompilation would be super helpful in rebasing, jumpin around branches, etc as I would not have to deal with the crap associated with my addin.

[unixfreak0037]

That's interesting. That's actually a direction I wanted to go a long time ago, to be able to create these OLE documents and specify all the settings and inputs on the command line. I think that would not only be useful for my own research purposes, but some other open source projects could probably use that as well.

Rather than merge something like that into the main branch, I think we should create a new branch with the goal of being able to create rather than disassemble, and the first thing we could target is the reassembly of the vbaProject.bin.

From a technical perspective, if what you're rebuilding is exactly what was extracted, then that would be pretty easy. To go the other way around might be a little more difficult but definitely not impossible.

[Beakerboy]

I know this is an old issue...but it’s still open so it’s fair game, right? I host some VBA code on GitHub and I can see a huge use case for this. If I merge a pull request to master, I could use TravisCI to take my code, build it into an excel add-in and push the result back to GitHub as a release, completing the automated CI cycle.