Re: [Libreoffice] errors in idl files

Hi Michael,

Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@suse.com> writes:
> No problem, but please reply-to-all so we CC the list, for others to
> find out what is going on & be helped by your questions too :-) [ feel
> free to CC the list on your reply to this ;-].

sorry it wasn't meant to be a private message, I need to check better
next time.

> > So it's roughly something like MS OLE CFB
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd942138%28v=prot.13%29.aspx
> > in-file filesystem for Word and PowerPoint?
>
> Correct; but -much- more broken than OLE ;-)

I see.

> > Is there any plan to move away from RDF files and use something
> > simpler, e.g. XML file describing all those types?
>
> Sure - we'd love to do that; OTOH it requires some concentrated
> hacking for a while.

Good to hear that.

> What are you trying to achieve though ? could you not re-use the store
> code ? and/or (better) the higher level type introspection APIs /
> interfaces ?

The ideal situation would be that

- I write my application in a dynamic programming language with no
  dependencies on libreoffice code;

- I deploy my application on target machines where libreoffice is
  already installed;

- My application reads the type library (RDB or better a simple XML
  alternative) of the actually installed libreoffice on the target
  machines (possibly different versions).

- My application communicates with libreoffice via UNO using the correct
  version of the type library (which I didn't exactly know before
  installing my application on the target machine).

So "the only" intersection between my application and libreoffice would
be the RDB file.  The rest would go over the UNO protocol.

At the moment, I parse IDL files and hope (or have to make sure) that
the installed libreoffice is compatible.

To an extend, I could probably build the type library dynamically by
querying all interfaces instead of reading the RDB file, but I think
that would be unnecessarily slow.

There seems to be some Python bridge to libreoffice. Does it use the
store code underneath a FFI?

Cheers,

Tomas