MATLAB Excel Builder

Overview

Building a Deployable Application

Using MATLAB Excel Builder to create a deployable application is a simple process requiring a sequence of six steps. For details see

• Creating a Project
• Managing M-Files and MEX-Files
• Building a Project
• Testing the Model
• Application Deployment
• Packaging and Distributing the Component

This section references various menus provided by the Excel Builder graphical user interface (GUI). For a full discussion of these menus, see Graphical User Interface.

Elements of an Excel Builder Project

A project consists of all the elements necessary to build a deployable application using the MATLAB Excel Builder. Excel Builder components are COM objects accessible from Microsoft Excel through Visual Basic for Applications. COM is an acronym for Component Object Model, which is Microsoft's binary standard for object interoperability. Each COM object exposes a class to the Visual Basic programming environment. The class contains a set of functions called methods, corresponding to the original MATLAB functions included in the component's project.

Note    Currently, MATLAB Excel Builder components support one class per component.

Classes

When creating a component, you must additionally provide a class name. The component name represents the name of the DLL file to be created. The class name denotes the name of the class that performs a call on a specific method at run-time. The relationship between component name and class name, and which methods (MATLAB functions) go into a particular class, are purely organizational. As a general rule, when compiling many MATLAB functions, it helps to determine a scheme of function categories and to create a separate class for each category. The name of each class should be descriptive of what the class does. Organizing related functions into classes in this way has the added advantage of reducing the amount of code to rebuild and redeploy when one function is changed.

Versions

MATLAB Excel Builder components also support a simple versioning mechanism. A version number is attached to a given component. This number gets automatically built into the DLL file name and the system registry information. As a general rule, the first version of a component is 1.0 (the default value if none is chosen). Changes made to the component before deployment keep the same version number. After deployment, change the version number for all subsequent changes, so that you can easily manage the new and old versions. The system sees classes in different versions of the same component as distinct, even if they have the same name.

Typographical Conventions

Creating a Project