Joerg Barfurth wrote:User configuration is stored in a limited set of files. To migrate stuff to another machine you could simply copy up all relevant files to the
and this exactly is the problem... configuration options are scattered. user must know which files must be copied. file ownership problems might bite user.
If it is *user* configuration, then it is all stored in directory ${userinst}/user/, where ${userinst} is $HOME/.openofficeXxx on un*x and %profile%/ApplicationData/openofficeXXX on windows. And every file in there should be owned by the user, so I'm not sure how anyone could be bitten here.
Copying that entire directory to another machine is the simplest way to transfer all your settings and should work for identical versions.
But if you want to transfer only a selected subset of your customizations, then you need to know which files to copy (and some files need not be copied at all, as they are transient caches or so).
In this case you need a taxonomy of the files or directories and documentation which settings are where. It probably is a worthwhile task to collect this information an make a readable document out of it.
As this does not require a developer, would you be interested in doing this?
other machine. For the configuration settings database there even is a (commandline) tool that allows importing configuration files into an existing configuration database, which will import single settings and leave existing settings in the destination installation unchanged otherwise.
i found configimport.bin - but somehow i'm unable to find detailed information about it's exact function, functionality. especially i have no idea what data it expects as an input.
It imports data into the configuration database. You can find links to documentation about the configuration database at <http://util.openoffice.org>. It needs xcu files (the file format that is used to store OOo settings in the configration database) as input. The configimport tool differs from simply file-copy in that it combines the imported settings with the ones that are already there.
For help on the cli interface try 'configimport.bin -h'
can this tool be used for configuration export ?
No. For configuration 'export' just copy a file from the configuration database (under ${userinst}/user/registry/data/).
For StarOffice there even is a tool where you can setup preferences in a central directory (using a webbased frontend) and have them apply those to all your instances or even to groups of people or machines.well, it's for staroffice... what do we get ?
StarOffice is mostly identical to OOo. Thus it would be possible to use this tool with OOo as well, if Sun decides to also release this as a separate product. But I doubt you'd save much over buying a StarOffice license.
But then that tool really makes sense only in large deployments (needing a directory server, a webserver, etc.).
Alternatively someone could create a similar tool that edits OOo configuration data directly, without going through webservers. There are two ways to approach this. One is to look at the configuration files directly (their format and storage is documented), the other is to use the OOo configuration API for this. Using the API has the advantage, that OOo provides you a merged view of configuration data (i.e. including default values) as the application will see it and takes care of writing correct data. OTOH there are some (few) features of the file formats, which currently can't be written via API. There also is information in the schema files which such an editor would need, which is not currently exposed by the API. So such a project would probably need to extend the API to cover these gaps.
how possible would it be to create such a functionality that oo.org would read a single file for configuration items and all settings that would be specified in this file would take precedence over all other places of settings ? in this case user could create such a file and just copy this single file over to another oo.org installation. it would be a single file, minimal screwup possibility, easy to edit etc.
Read the documentation. OOo has an elaborate configuration system. In that system values set by the user override other values. This is necessary to make the preferences UI work properly. So any such changes would have to be merged into the user settings files. This is what configimport does. You can also specify (user-specific or shared) data that is protected against overriding, so that users can't change it. In most cases this will be detected by the UI code, so that these settings will be disabled in the preferences UI.
But having everything in one file is not really a good idea. That file would be huge and unwieldy, create unwanted coupling at runtime, ...
Some statistics:
The OOo (version 1.9.74) configuration schema has: - ~3500 documented items - ~1875 of them are properties (settings)
Schema items may occur multiple times in the configuration data, so we have in the configuration default settings:
- ~14000 properties
And this is counting only the stuff in the configuration database. There may be properties in there, which you don't really want to change. But there is more configuration data (e.g. custom menus and toolbars, color tables, hash patterns, gallery items, autotext) using different file formats elsewhere in the user settings directory. Some of that is binary data and not well suited for inclusion in a text configuration file.
If you want a single file for easy transfer, tar or zip together the relevant files, so that unpacking the archive distributes them to the proper places.
Ciao, Jörg
-- Joerg Barfurth Sun Microsystems - Desktop - Hamburg >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> using std::disclaimer <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenOffice.org Configuration http://util.openoffice.org
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