I want to emphasize that anyone who tries to do something and gets stuck
should post questions here or on d...@openoffice.apache.org. Somebody
else may have already solved your problem, and your ideas may help
someone else.
On 2/10/2017 10:40 AM, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
Introduction:
I'm a member of the OpenOffice Project Management Committee. Some time
ago, I pushed the creation of the recruitment@ mailing list, and offered
to do some mentoring of new volunteers.
The good news is that, although now retired, I am a very experienced
developer. The bad news is that I am relatively new to OpenOffice
development. We will be learning its implementation together.
There seems to be a critical mass of developers here, so I would like to
offer you a joint project. I'm asking each person to attack this from
their own point of view, using their own skills and resources. Whenever
you find out anything about the problem, please post it here. The hope
is that your combined skills will be even more effective than each of
you could be individually.
Project:
There is a difference between spreadsheet and text document behavior.
The text document behavior is the more desirable. The objective is to
understand why spreadsheets don't behave the same way, and fix it.
OpenOffice supports embedded OLE document links. I created each of the
attached files by creating a new document and then inserting a link:
Insert -> Object -> OLE Object
In the dialog, pick "Create from file" radio button, enable "Link to
file", and select a text file. The one I used contained the text "This
is the dummy file on the Windows 10 computer", and the path to the file
is c:/OpenOfficeDev/test_files/dummy.txt. If you want to use a different
path, you should create your own test files.
To see the different behavior, open each file on a computer that has a
file with the same path but different content. The text file
original.odt asks if you want to update links. If you select "yes" you
will see the content on the computer on which you are running, not the
original text. The spreadsheet original.ods does not - it just uses the
copy of the original text from original.ods.
I would like to get the spreadsheet to go through the same dialog as the
text document.
Resources:
The key for developers getting started is the build instructions at
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide_AOO/Step_by_step.
Even if you don't want to actually build, you can use it for getting
access to the source code.
There is an index of the source code at
http://opengrok.adfinis-sygroup.org/source/ There may well be better
tools for doing the same job - feel free to post suggestions here.
Some of the files contain German comments. There is a problem for those
of us who do not know German. The usual solution of pasting the text
into an on-line translator does not work well because of the style and
jargon. Fortunately, we have some people who are fluent in both German
and English, and a system for asking them to translate a specific
module. If you are familiar with Bugzilla, or want to learn it, see
https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=39199 If you prefer not to
deal with Bugzilla at this time, post the path to the file here and I'll
request translation.
Of course, ask any questions here as well as posting any results you get.
