OpenOffice Programibility

[Sal DiStefano]

Hi
One of the bigest features of MS Office is the ability to automate it. Are similar features available in Open Office 1.x? The last I looked at Star Office 5.x there was no object model available to programmers, has this changed?
Thank You
Sal
[ March 04, 2003: Message edited by: Sal DiStefano ]

[M.K.A. Monster]

On the website of open-office I read the following. So it is even possible to program things in Java for the OpenOffice suite.

The powerful OpenOffice.org API allows you to create external functions to leverage the power of the suite just how you need it. Independent programmers can use our free software development kit (SDK) to extend the suite in ways we haven't even thought of. You can use OpenOffice.org Basic or Java and C/C++. More languages are being worked on at http://api.openoffice.org/.

Regards,
Mark Monster

[Matthew Phillips]

Does anyone who has used this feature have any comments on it?

[Solveig Laura Haugland]

You can certainly automate away since the API is published, and of course there's the OOo/SO macro language. I haven't used it but there is a lot of traffic on the openoffice.org user's list, more on the dev list, from people doing things with it.
The OOo/SO file formats unzip to XML, so you can do a lot of powerful stuff with scripts tht unzip, change, save, and rezip. Mass updates are really easy with just a bit of scripting. Also note that it's not just the content you can change. You get content.xml, styles.xml, etc. and a meta-inf directory. All when you unzip.
Pasting in from the book below.
Solveig

The reason StarOffice and OpenOffice.org files are so small is that they�re stored in XML, not binary format. You can also just unzip any file to see the XML files that make it up. Each regular document file has separate XML files that make it up, such as one containing the content, one containing the formatting, and so on.
When you use a ZIP program to unzip a document, you�ll get the following files.
The plain text content content.xml. You can view this file with a standard text editor such as TextPad. content.xml is stored without indents so it�s not that easy to read, but takes up less space. You can make it more readable by choosing Tools > Options > Load/Save > General and deselecting the Size Optimization for XML Format option.
meta.xml contains the information about the document displayed under File > Properties.
If you save a document with security, only meta.xml is not secured.
settings.xml contains further information like printer settings and data sources.
styles.xml contains the styles defined for the document.
The meta-inf/manifest.xml file describes the structure of the XML file.