Hi John,
I need the ability to set system wide defaults. Currently set things like default fonts, data sources and autosave. It would be nice to setup all the name, address information.
I suspect others with an enterprise environment would find this useful.
I have tried a couple things over the years but nothing has been 100% satisfactory.
Current I'm running rh7.3 with a generic openoffice 1.1.0.
It's time to update and want to reevaluate my methods.
What I currently do is to edit the xml files. /usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/share
Can get away with this because I have complete control over the installation.
As far as I can see openoffice merges the configurations from share with the users personal install user/ files. A really nice solution would be to merge in configs from in a system config directory.
Another method that I have done is to add a hook in the install part of openoffice startup program to copy in additional configuration data into the personal install.
I need some sort of solution very soon. Is there something in place that I'm not aware of? Any plans? Appreciate any comments or suggestions on the best way to proceed.
I'm not sure I understand why you don't like using share as the repository for system wide settings (as this is what it's for). This forces you to use shared installations, but that's anyway probably a good idea.
Now on how to deploy configuration updates to a shared installation (or indeed to any installation), there's a better (as in less error prone and more forgiving) way by using UNO packages. A proper full description of these can be found in the developer's guide, but to summarise it's a way of deploying addons to OOo, such as new macros, UNO components (i.e libraries) and their associated configuration. Using this mechanism, you can add new layers of configuration which will be merged with the other ones (found in share/registry and user/registry).
The way to use this mechanism is to create a configuration file in the xcu format (that I assume you're familiar with if you manually edited configuration files) containing only the updates you want, put that file in a zip file, put that zip file in either share/uno_packages or user/uno_packages, and then run <install>/program/pkgchk, with the -s flag for shared packages. This will take the package and install it. The nice thing is that if your modifications cause harm or you want to modify them, you can just remove the zip file from the directory, run pkgchk again and the modifications will be reverted.
I also would suggest you have a look at the detailed description of the OOo registry format accessible on http://util.openoffice.org to have an idea of how merging works, and of how you can protect some settings so that users cannot modify them. Feel free to ask questions if you need more information.
Cyrille
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