Open Life

It’s the middle of the night here in Barcelona and before further waiting for day 1 (2nd day of my stance). I had to blog something.

Today was a busy day no doubt with many old faces back again in the mix while some old nicks just got new faces. These never seems to stop amazing me on these kind of events.

So let’s get started, first of all let’s start with the meetings. The meeting started pretty laid back with people joining the room gradually until the room was full. Once we got going people were a bit shy to talk. Charles and Rafaella did most of the talking at the beginning giving a status as NLC and 10ln did in the past year.

The NLC meeting was followed by the MarCons or Marketing Contact meetings and a lot of good ammount of rants were produced on this meeting. Finally the NLC party was a very good and important event for all of us where we got the chance to eat some good real food and interact with many people of the community. I finally got the chance to meet long time OOoES community members such as Ismael Fanlo and Falcaraz which are very active in the community.

I also talked with Rafaella Braconi and other developers such as Rob Weir and Leif Lodahi were very helpful to talk about the different issues involving OOXML and it’s implementation.

After the NLC party we both went on to a pub which was quite fun and I have the chance to talk more with other community members as well as the Kiberpipa guys. We talk about business in FLOSS and how to achieve it around OOo. I gave many examples including having an environment where we can make a stronger point on migrating OOo by covering it with more tools like, a student / teacher book and also a better strategy than just pointing them out to the website.

I had to leave early since I needed to get back to the hotel before it was too late for my train to depart. I left at 10:15 which was enough time since it seems trains run until midnight. I finally got home and got enough time to prepare for tomorrow.

It’s the middle of the night here in Barcelona and before further waiting for day 1 (2nd day of my stance). I had to blog something.

Today was a busy day no doubt with many old faces back again in the mix while some old nicks just got new faces. These never seems to stop amazing me on these kind of events.

So let’s get started, first of all let’s start with the meetings. The meeting started pretty laid back with people joining the room gradually until the room was full. Once we got going people were a bit shy to talk. Charles and Rafaella did most of the talking at the beginning giving a status as NLC and 10ln did in the past year.

The NLC meeting was followed by the MarCons or Marketing Contact meetings and a lot of good ammount of rants were produced on this meeting. Finally the NLC party was a very good and important event for all of us where we got the chance to eat some good real food and interact with many people of the community. I finally got the chance to meet long time OOoES community members such as Ismael Fanlo and Falcaraz which are very active in the community.

I also talked with Rafaella Braconi and other developers such as Rob Weir and Leif Lodahi were very helpful to talk about the different issues involving OOXML and it’s implementation.

After the NLC party we both went on to a pub which was quite fun and I have the chance to talk more with other community members as well as the Kiberpipa guys. We talk about business in FLOSS and how to achieve it around OOo. I gave many examples including having an environment where we can make a stronger point on migrating OOo by covering it with more tools like, a student / teacher book and also a better strategy than just pointing them out to the website.

I had to leave early since I needed to get back to the hotel before it was too late for my train to depart. I left at 10:15 which was enough time since it seems trains run until midnight. I finally got home and got enough time to prepare for tomorrow.

It’s the middle of the night here in Barcelona and before further waiting for day 1 (2nd day of my stance). I had to blog something.

Today was a busy day no doubt with many old faces back again in the mix while some old nicks just got new faces. These never seems to stop amazing me on these kind of events.

So let’s get started, first of all let’s start with the meetings. The meeting started pretty laid back with people joining the room gradually until the room was full. Once we got going people were a bit shy to talk. Charles and Rafaella did most of the talking at the beginning giving a status as NLC and 10ln did in the past year.

The NLC meeting was followed by the MarCons or Marketing Contact meetings and a lot of good ammount of rants were produced on this meeting. Finally the NLC party was a very good and important event for all of us where we got the chance to eat some good real food and interact with many people of the community. I finally got the chance to meet long time OOoES community members such as Ismael Fanlo and Falcaraz which are very active in the community.

I also talked with Rafaella Braconi and other developers such as Rob Weir and Leif Lodahi were very helpful to talk about the different issues involving OOXML and it’s implementation.

After the NLC party we both went on to a pub which was quite fun and I have the chance to talk more with other community members as well as the Kiberpipa guys. We talk about business in FLOSS and how to achieve it around OOo. I gave many examples including having an environment where we can make a stronger point on migrating OOo by covering it with more tools like, a student / teacher book and also a better strategy than just pointing them out to the website.

I had to leave early since I needed to get back to the hotel before it was too late for my train to depart. I left at 10:15 which was enough time since it seems trains run until midnight. I finally got home and got enough time to prepare for tomorrow.

So I want to make a small tutorial for a baby step world. The main point is to re-use the python samples included in OpenOffice.org. We won't generate code, instead we will just compare notice the difference and modify slightly to change it's behavior.

The first thing we will do is copy the samples that are on the OpenOffice.org system and move them to our OpenOffice.org profile. We will assure that the permissions are assigned to us and finally try to make the pythonTables script behave like the HelloWorld script.

The HelloWorld insert a text into the document, while the pythonTables will generate a new document and then insert text, tables, frames and other writer utilities.

Let's get going!!!

First we will copy our script:

$ sudo cp -Rv /opt/openoffice.org2.2/share/Scripts/python/ \\
   ~/.openoffice.org2/user/Scripts/

Now we will change the permissions of the script:

$ cd ~/.openoffice.org2/user/Scripts/ \\
$ chown -Rv user.user python/

where user is your current user account name.

Now we will have some writing permissions:

$ chmod -Rv 766 python/*

Let the Hacking begin!!

So first we will run the scripts just to see that they work and nothing has gone wrong....

• First step is starting OpenOffice.org: Launch OpenOffice.org
  
• Go to Tools > Macros > Organize macros > Python...
  
• You will face a dialog with a list of Python macros divided into 3 areas My Macros, OpenOffice.org Macros and Untitled.
  
• Go to My Macros and expand it by clicking on the "+"
  
• Select the HelloWorld and HelloWorldPython and click on Execute.
  

This will insert the text Hello World (in Python) on the current document.

Now lets try the other script, TableSample which will add a full text of the document. Repeat the steps that we mentioned before but instead of selecting HelloWorld, go to PythonSamples > TableSample > createTable.

This will generate a New Document with a bunch of information. So we now know that our scripts are working properly.

Open a text editor and open HelloWorld.py and TableSample.py from the ~/.openoffice.org2/user/Scripts/python folder. TableSamples might be in the pythonSamples folders so you will have to dig deeper to find it.

You will see that HelloWorld is a simple script of just 13 lines of code while TableSample.py have nearly 96 lines of code. Don't let that intimidate you, most of the lines are just because of the amount of data that it dump to the document, but the principle is not that many lines different.

Look at the HelloWorld.py and you will see the following line:

model = XSCRIPTCONTEXT.getDocument()
#get the XText interface
    text = model.Text

This is the most important line and the key to what we want. We can see that there is something called the XSCRIPTCONTEXT. This is what we are looking for and major difference between both codes.

XSCRIPTCONTEXT will save us a lot of hacking in the future of coding with pyuno. However now this line will help us use the current document.

Now lets turn to the TableSample.py, we will see many functions each one with a good chunk of code. If we look closer we can see that we have 2 functions, insertTextIntoCell, and createTable. InsertTextintoCell is just a few lines long and we can see that there is nothing to our use since it focus on configuring the table. We look into the createTable and we see immediately the comment: creates a new writer document and inserts a table with some data (also known as the SWriter sample).

See that wasn't that hard, we see that following the comment there is a line like:

 ctx=uno.getComponent()

We remember that the first script had something similar but on XSCRIPTCONTEXT instead of uno and getDocument() instead of getComponent(). If we keep on looking at the code we see other lines:

    smgr = ctx.ServiceManager
    desktop = smgr.createInstanceWithContext( "com.sun.star.frame.Desktop",ctx)
    
    # open a writer document
    doc = desktop.loadComponentFromURL( "private:factory/swriter","_blank", 0, () )

This becomes clearer that if something in the code should change, should be this part. The doc variable is the one that actually generates the new writer document. And then we will see actions applied to the doc container like on line 32 when we generate a table by creating an instance of the TextTable.

    table = doc.createInstance( "com.sun.star.text.TextTable" )

If we go back to HelloWorld.py we have the model variable as opposed to the doc variable but there is no fundamental difference and we can just replace that chunk of code. So we will just comment those lines and have something like:

def createTable():
    """creates a new writer document and inserts a table with some data (also known as the SWriter sample)""" 
#    ctx = uno.getComponentContext()
#    smgr = ctx.ServiceManager
#    desktop = smgr.createInstanceWithContext( "com.sun.star.frame.Desktop",ctx)
    
    # open a writer document
#    doc = desktop.loadComponentFromURL( "private:factory/swriter","_blank", 0, () )
    model = XSCRIPTCONTEXT.getDocument()
    text = model.Text
    cursor = text.createTextCursor()
    text.insertString( cursor, "The first line in the newly created text document.\n", 0 )
    text.insertString( cursor, "Now we are in the second line\n" , 0 )
    
    # create a text table
    table = model.createInstance( "com.sun.star.text.TextTable" )

However since we mention before that the original code reference the document as 'doc' and now we just assigned to 'model' we can do a search and replace so that the instructions like the table one reference to model.

We go ahead and execute createTable under Tools > Macros > Organize Macros > Python... and vioala we are done.
Final shot
Happy hacking!!!

Sam Hiser is one of the original founders of the OpenOffice.org community, he has been available to the community since early 2000-2001. He has also co write one of the very first OpenOffice.org books. Using of course, OpenOffice.org.

Now he launches a great in depth analysis of OpenDocument format and the OpenXML format from Microsoft. He goes into topics such as true openness, study of the components and legacy dependency. This is a great topic that also has much to do with a recent interview by Gary Edwards at IT Conversations.

Very good read to jump on board with what's going on at the Open Standard camp.

http://fussnotes.typepad.com/Achieving_Openness_1point0.html