Hi All
Those of you at ApacheCon last year will have seen me demo the then
closed-beta BFF tool from Microsoft. It's taken a bit longer than planned
to get it to GA, but the good news is that everyone can now get a copy!
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeinteroperability/archive/2011/07/12/microsoft-office-binary-file-format-validator-is-now-available.aspx
For those of you who weren't at ApacheCon, and who are wondering what this
tool is and why you should care, I'll explain!
The BFF Validator, Binary File Format Validator, is a tool that the
Microsoft Office Interoperability Team has been working on for about a
year now. The idea of the tool is to help people developing third party
implementations (eg POI, OpenOffice or xlwt) of the binary file formats
(.xls, .ppt and .doc) to check that they're correctly implementing the
specs. You can run the BFF Validator against a file, and it'll tell you if
anything in it isn't correct according to the spec (in as far as it has
checks for things). In most cases, it'll also try to point you at the bit
of the spec that explains what's wrong.
It should be pointed out that not all files that pass the validator are
correct (it may not check everything), and not all files that fail are
incorrect (it's a very very strict check, and many applications including
Office are more lax), but it's a good start! It may even fail on checking,
in which case let the guys'n'gals in Redmond know so they can improve the
tool for the next release :)
For POI in the short term, it could be very handy for bug reports where
the user isn't able to share the file. Instead they'll be able to run the
BFF validator and ensure their source file is actually correct (handy if
POI's barfing on reading), and then report back what's wrong on output.
With any luck, we'll be able to turn those pesky "my POI generated file
gives an error in excel, but I can't share the file" bug reports into "on
page 257 you're supposed to set the options flag to 5 if you have over 32
children, but POI is incorrectly setting 3 in all cases". Well, we can
dream..!
Longer term, it'd be great to run the BFF validator against all of our
test output files and fix up any issues reported, but that's a much longer
term task...
Nick
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