Extending OpenOffice.org

Sorry, I have been away from my blog for a few days.

This summer I wrote a Danish manual about extensions and how to create and maintain extensions( http://doc.oooforum.dk/Extensions.pdf ). When I wrote the manual, I used both the wiki on http://www.OpenOffice.org : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Extensions . I also used two articles by Dimitri Popov (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7802 and http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9412).

Dimitri is using an example in his article, where he is creating dummy text with Lorem Ipsum. I remember, that it was annoying that the example was masde as a mock up as example and didn't actually create Lorem Ipsum text. I know that this was not the purpose of the article, but I was still thinking: "Why not do it ?".

I have never made a macro in OpenOffice.org before, so I took this as a challenge. I had to find out everything from the beginning and I has some difficulties extracting data from the XML stream. The solution is a little clumsy, I will admit that. If any of you know a better and more elegant way, please feel free to make a new macro.

There is still a few other issues , but I expect to get them solved over the next few weeks.

I have uploaded the solution as extension to the repository, but it's actually not published yet. You can find the odt-file here: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/download/288

When you have installed the extension, you will see a new tool bar with a button. This button will call http://www.lipsum.com/ give you some dummy text. Not rocket science, but anyway a helpfull feature.

Thanks to DannyB for this description of how to parse an XML stream http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=4907 and to Andrew Pitonyak for his dokumentation "Useful Macro Information".