On Jan 17, 2012, at 3:50 PM, Gregg Morris wrote:

> Hello--
> 
> We have a process that takes a Word document (docx) and merges content into
> it, at locations in the document indicated by the document's creator. At
> the moment there is a small set of authors using only Word 2008 (for Mac),
> but this is likely to soon become a larger group of authors using Word for
> Windows (2007+) as well.

Is your Word 2008 fully updated? There were issues with the XML that MSFT 
produced for the initial PowerPoint 2008 that MSFT had to correct with an 
update.

> We've discovered that Word can produce documents that cause
> NullPointerExceptions when loaded into POI. Two cases appear to be bugs
> (not handling objects that could be null), but one case clearly is not:
> "OPC Compliance error [M4.1]: there is more than one core properties
> relationship in the package !". Word can happily read and write files that
> cause this error in POI.
> 
> My concerns are these:
> 1) How do I tell my authors to avoid this? In other words, what are they
> doing in Word to create multiple core properties?
> 2) Knowing that Word can cheerfully read and write documents that POI
> considers invalid, but needing to support my users, should I modify the POI
> code to relax this particular error checking? In this case I could just use
> the first core properties document part that is encountered and ignore any
> others. I guess this is a letter-of-the-law versus intent-of-the-law
> situation. It's not a perfect world out there; how best to handle it?

AFAIK our philosophy is "intent-of-the-law" and not "letter-of-the-law", but we 
need edge cases like yours.

You are free to modify POI and make it work for your case. Patches are always 
welcome!

I also think that this should be considered a bug in POI and if possible you 
should create a Bugzilla entry including a document that shows the issue. The 
document will be publicly available and should contain no personally sensitive 
information. Perhaps the developers will solve the trouble once the details are 
available.

Regards,
Dave

> 
> Thanks for any suggestions!
> Gregg


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]

Reply via email to