What's the “proper” way to retrieve a reference to a ribbon object?

Question

For a VSTO workbook project, is there a best practice for retrieving a reference to the Ribbon object from the ThisWorkbook class?

Here's what I'm doing: In my Ribbon class, I created a public method called InvalidateControl(string controlID). I need to call that method from the ThisWorkbook class based on when a certain workbook level event fires. But the only way I can see to "get" a reference to that Ribbon object is to do this...

    // This is all in the ThisWorkbook class
    Ribbon ribbon;
    protected override IRibbonExtensibility CreateRibbonExtensibilityObject()
    {
        this.ribbon = new Ribbon();
        return this.ribbon;
    }

...which seems a little smelly. I mean, I have to override CreateRibbonExtensibilityObject() regardless; all I'm doing beyond that is maintaining a local reference to the ribbon so I can call methods against it. But it doesn't feel right. Is there another, better way to get that reference in the ThisWorkbook class? Or is this pretty acceptable?

Thanks!

Answer 1

A much simpler way is to create a global static variable somewhere (e.g. in ThisWorkbook).

public static Ribbon ribbonref;

Then in the code of the Ribbon class, in the event handler for the initialization event (I think the method is called Ribbon1_StartUp() but I'm not sure), set the variable:

private void Ribbon1_StartUp(object sender, EventArg e)
{
    ThisWorkbook.ribbonref = this;
}

(written from memory so may not be exactly right)

You can then use ribbonref to access your ribbon instance.

Answer 2

Please see this MSDN page which shows the use of the Globals object:

Globals.Ribbons.MyRibbon.MyObject.Text = "test";