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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Scripting of kword and other office applications
From:       David Faure <david () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2001-09-25 19:18:17
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On Mardi 25 Septembre 2001 20:47, Joseph Wenninger wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I really like the idea of the DCop interfaces, but I don't think they are 
> really userfull. It could by that I'm to silly, but I can't even add a table 
> with 3 columns and 2 rows to a kword file from within a script (bash). I 
> think it is a nice feature that all actions are  exported, but what is it 
> good for, if the only action (which I found) for inserting a table is the 
> view's insert_table action, which pops up an modal dialog, so that kword 
> doesn't react to any further dcop calls, till this dialog is closed by the 
> user.
> 
> Is there something planned to build a real usefull, standardized dcop 
> interface for koffice applications, which eg doesn't show popupdialogs, but 
> provides functioncalls like insert_table(columns,rows,inline) ?? I think in 
> this area there should be something done to improve usability. M$Office VBA 
> is usfull (despite the security issues), but koffice is far behind.

Right. Patches that add DCOP methods are more than welcome.

I have started working on the "insert text" stuff, feel free to add DCOP objects
and methods for the rest of the functionality (see KPresenter for an example
app where the base dcop classes from libkofficecore are reimplemented).

I don't understand "standardized dcop interface" from the above.
The main entry points (shell, document and view) are standardized, but
the rest can't be (what would insertTable do in KPresenter ? ;-)
 
> It could be that I'm just too silly, or that the koffice features are just to 
> badly documented. If I misinterpreted the current scripting situation in 
> koffice the wrong way, than I'm sorry, but I'm quite stressed and at the end 
> of nerves, trying to use kword as some kind of report generator, which would 
> be quite easy in M$ Word to do

A rather easy way to _generate_ documents would be to write a program
or script that generates the XML for it, independently from any running
KWord process. The DTD being fully documented, and starting from an
existing document or template, this should be quite easy.

-- 
David FAURE, david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://perso.mandrakesoft.com/~david/ , http://www.konqueror.org/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
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