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------- Additional comments from [email protected] Mon Mar 23 06:49:54 +0000 2009 ------- Basically, everyone who's commented in favor of restoring this functionality is right. It's a matter of the user being able to control the program, instead of the program making assumptions about what the user wants. In my book, assuming that all users want some a program to behave in some specific way is often one of the worst things software can do. It seems to me that these are the basic requirements of what we need regarding file associations: -User must be able to control whether OpenOffice becomes the default application -It must be possible to control this with the installer for silent installations -The ability to control the file associations within the program itself, after it's installed. The last one isn't really a requirement, but it would be very useful to me and, I suspect, other users. I much prefer OpenOffice, but occassionally someone I'm submitting work to requires a Microsoft file. I love OpenOffice, but when you need to draw pictures and do other out of the ordinary things, saving a .doc file with OpenOffice just doesn't work. When that kind of situation arises, I'm forced to install MS Office to do that work and save it. When I'm done, I like to uninstall MS Office and get it off my system. Recently, this has left me with no easy way to restore the file associations that I originally chose when installing OpenOffice previously. I could uninstall/reinstall OO, but I'm worried about losing settings and templates. For this sort of situation, where a third party (a program or person) changes the file associations, it would be very useful to be able to get OpenOffice to reclaim the associations without having to deal with installers at all. The following suggestion may sound weird and not feasible since I'm not versed in how OpenOffice or MS installers work, but perhaps it might useful as a starting point. I suggest moving the actual code for claiming file associations into the application itself. From there, users can manually control the associations at any time. This would seem to violate the requirement for silent installs, but is it somehow possible to activate the program's code from inside the installer once installation is otherwise complete? If so, dialogs could be placed in the installer, and this could be saved as a setting and the associations could be made by the actual application code. In regards to how the dialog should work, I suggest a tree structure. A full blown list of file extensions would be too confusing for many users, but if the list were divided into a tree, then a user could select the top nodes (which would be things like "Microsoft Office Files", "Microsoft Works Files", and "Open Office Files") to select all the file types under that heading. The tree could also be expanded so advanced users could control the file types individually. Select All/Select None buttons would also be useful. The dialog could be implemented this way in both the installer and the application. Additionally, within the application itself, OpenOffice should have some kind of button that makes it reclaim all its prompted file associations. It might be useful to do something like Mozilla products do: when they open, they notify you that the file associations its supposed to maintain have changed and prompts the user whether or not to restore the associations. If that kind of behavior were to be implemented, it should be possible to make it stop asking you (probably where you control the file associations themselves). Of course, when you make it stop asking, it does NOT restore those associations automatically; it does nothing about them. Even if that kind of behavior is not implemented, though, I would greatly appreciate some kind of mechanism to easily make OpenOffice restore the file associations I told it to have since other programs (such as MS Office) can steal them. A tree-like structure also opens up some possibilities for silent installs. There could be parameters for the tree headings (MS Office files, etc.), a parameter for all file types, and a parameter for no file types; the installer should also still be able to handle a list of individual file types somehow. What the default behavior should be in this sort of design, I don't know. I'm not directly exposed to that type of situation. Thanks to all of you who spend your time making OpenOffice better. Hopefully, you will find this helpful. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
