Hi there, over the past two years students at the "Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien" (Business Administration and MIS students) have been able to explore OpenOffice for automation purposes, using the opensource and "human centric" scripting language "ooRexx" together with the Apache BSF (Bean Scripting Framework).
As one of the results, their work gives an introduction into the programming model of OOo, with the intent, that "newcomers" get an overview and some nutshell examples they can put their fingers on. Many of these nutshell examples have been submitted to the OOo snippets database (<http://codesnippets.services.openoffice.org/>). Even if one does not use ooRexx for programming, these works may prove helpful for the newcomers (or people new to specific module). ooRexx looks like pseudo-code, so should be understandable right away (there is an explicit message operator '~', where the literal right of it is always the message name which gets sent to the object on the left side of the tilde). The "snippeted" examples have hyperlinks to lead you right to the IDL definitions of the interfaces that get used. As ooRexx uses the OOo Java interfaces (via BSF) transparently, one could map the ooRexx solutions to Java also rather easily. Here the URLs: * Index/Overview-Page (contains also other student's work, that might be helpful or interesting): <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html> * Ahammer, Andreas: "OpenOffice.org Automation: Object Model, Scripting Languages, 'Nutshell'-Examples", 2005-11: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#backk_07> * Burger, Martin: "OpenOffice.org Automatisation with Object Rexx", 2006-01: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#bakk_200601> * Görlich, Gerhard; Realfsen, Asmund; Spanberger, David: "BSF4Rexx and OpenOffice.org Nutshell-Examples", 2006-07: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#sem_200607_01> * Hinz, Michael: "OpenOffice.org (Calc): Automatisation with Object Rexx", 2006-07: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#bakk_200607_01> * Prem, Matthias: "ooRexx Snippets for OpenOffice.org Writer", 2006-07: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#OpenOffice.org Automatisation with Object Rexx> * Kauril, Michael: "Flexible Word Processing Automation with OpenOffice.org" (a little proof-of-concept work for the city of Vienna), 2007-01: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#bakk_200701b> * Schmid, Stefan: "Facilitate Data Access in OpenOffice.org using ooRexx", 2007-02: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/index.html#bakk_200702> Again, there is no need to know or to use ooRexx in order to read the above information about programming OpenOffice.org modules. It should be rather straight forward to apply the learned concepts to any of the other programming languages one can use with OOo. --- A last remark: the Apache BSF-infrastructure could be used to enable even further scripting languages to interact with OpenOffice (and to allow them to be used as a macro languages by supplying respective scripting engines for OOo adapting the opensourced ooRexx engine). HTH, ---rony P.S.: Currently, there are two students who try to come up with nutshell examples specifically for Draw and Impress, projected deadline: beginning of July. P.P.S.: In case someone wants to run the examples too: * Download-Links for (the opensource) ooRexx interpreter from the ooRexx homepage: <http://www.oorexx.org/download.html>. * Bookmarkable location of (the opensource) BSF4Rexx (includes support for OpenOffice.org) package: <http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/rexx/bsf4rexx/current/> ooRexx or BSF4Rexx specific questions could be asked via the newsgroup: <news:comp.lang.rexx>.
