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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Serial letters are back
From:       Werner Trobin <trobin () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-08-27 18:22:40
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Thomas Zander wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 07:27:25PM +0200, Sven Lueppken wrote:
> > Hi again!
> >
> > I worked on serial letters again and commited
> > the attached patch one hour ago!
> > Everything works great but I'm quite unsatisfied with
> > the current implementation!
> >
> > Users which came from other operating systems usually expect
> > that they're able to connect to a spreadsheet application to
> > import their records as variables into their wordprocessor!
> > In KWord you have to insert them all by hand! That's quite complicated and
> > double work if you have already created a Excel or KSpread table with your
> > addresses, names etc.!
> >
> > I thought of creating a kind of import filter for KSpread so that KWord
> > can take the records from a KSpread table!
> > What do you think of that idea? Do you have any idea how I could do this?
> > Any other suggestions, opinions? :)
> >
> 
> Basically I have not really understood the concept of serial letters in KWord
> to well, and I think that is a bad thing.  (/me not being really stupid and
> probably smarter then the some users ;)
> 
> Much can be fixed by a new and better dialog for this, but your statement
> about external imports is valid.
> 
> However I was thinking about a more modular solve then the one you described;
> 
> I was thinking about a plugins-like option where the user can select a
> script we, or a third party, provide.
> This script will (open and) query a kspread instance and read the data via
> a scripting language to KWord, making that import painless.
> 
> The script can also be rewritten to use another datasource, like a database
> for instance.
> 
> I always planned to use KoScript for this, since it is powerfull enought to
> do so, but not powerfull enough to create viruses in.
> 
> DCOP is for that reason not really a good idea, since we don't want to install
> a script that has the option to write to  the filesystem at the same time.
> 
> Werner; is the above an option in KoScript, since you asked recently about
> the 'future' of KoScript...

Well, due to security concerns you can neither open files nor
talk to the DCOP server nor lauch applications/execute shell
commands. Due to that you're pretty much limited to the
"sandbox" inside the application and can't really communicate
with the "outside" world from within the scripting language.

However, it's possible to "register" some functionality (as
KSpread does with all its internal functions) which are just
a callback to your C++ code inside the application. This means
you can provide a KOScript module which e.g. allows limited IPC
from the scripting language. As you would end up in having most
of the code in KWord again I doubt that this is what you want :)

Ciao,
Werner
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