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Calligra/Proposal for scripting in ODF

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< Calligra
Revision as of 10:55, 15 November 2011 by Sebsauer (talk | contribs) (→Proposal)

This page should provide a suggestion how to implement scripting in ODF.

Proposal

  • So far the only way to get such dynamic functionality in is using macros. But macros suck, they are unflexible and functionality is missing.
  • Since this days we have so many different Javascript-implementations around + they allow to sandbox (unlike python for exampl) + they are light and fast (unlike Java) and are already a de facto standard in HTML it would make sense to get Javascript into ODF as official "scripting-language".
  • The Javascript is loaded from and saved to the ODF document zip-file as ScriptN/content.js and then referenced with a unique name in the document-content or other scripts.
  • Ideally Calligra, LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are adopting the same solution with compatible Javascript-APIs.

Use-cases

  • Allow to register Javascript for on-load or on-save events.
  • Do something if e.g. an image is clicked.
  • Formula variable for calculation.
  • Forms, e.g. input-validation.

API

  • Allow live-editing access (loading and manipulation) to the ODF DOM tree from with Javascript. That covers all kind of manipulation-scenarios and provides an (in the ODF specifications) already well documented API and proven API. So, very much what Javascript is able to do with HTML+Stylesheet in the Browser for a Office-suite.
  • Helper-classes written in Javascript could provide a higher level API to deal with the ODF DOM tree.
  • It would maybe make sense to allow access from within Javascript to the Calligra Tables formula logic. So Words and Stage could do complex calculations the OpenFormula way in Javascript.
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