Statistica's COM library docs suck
Argh ... trying to automate Statistica to get it to do some graphs, except the documentation for the COM library omits basic things like the types of objects that functions return. The docs say things like:
LinePlot2D.Options
Description
Returns the statistical graph options of the graph
Return Value
None.
See LinePlot2D for additional properties available to STATISTICA LinePlot2D objects.
Nowhere in there did it mention that LinePlot2D.Options
is a property of type StatsGraphsOptions
, so you have to go and find example code to be able to find out what the options actually are.
It also doesn't tell you what values enumerated variables can have. That is really annoying.
At least I'm working in Python, which figures out most of the types for me, so I can just grab the Options
property and look at the results of dir(opts)
to get more of a clue as to what's going on. If I had Visual Studio installed, which I don't, I would probably be able to get much more info on the calls by browsing the type library, but I've only got the 60-day demo version at home, and I don't feel like waiting 6 hours for it to install. win32all's COM MakePy tool has given me a statistica.py
file to look at, but it doesn't have all the info I need either.