Do not miss your opportunity to enter Christoph's time machine, if you could not attend this years OOoCon in Orvieto. Even if you have attended, it gives you the possibility to see the conference from a non-developers point of view. Enjoy!

Best regards,

Frank

tags: ooocon oooocon2009 renaissance user-experience

New-style service constructors in OpenOffice.org Basic

Starting with OpenOffice.org 3.2 OpenOffice.org Basic allows to use UNO new-style service constructors (for more details please see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/ProUNO/Services).

To achieve this UNO services are now mapped to OpenOffice.org Basic objects. They have to be addressed by using the complete UNO namespace path. Let's take the example from the "Service Constructors" section in the wiki page mentioned above completed by a dummy module:

module com { module sun { module star { module foo {

service SomeService: XSomeInterface {

create1();

create2([in] long arg1, [in] string arg2);

create3([in] any... rest);

};

}; }; }; };

Then the service object can be addressed like this:

Dim oSomeServiceObj

oSomeServiceObj = com.sun.star.foo.SomeService

All constructors defined for a new-style service are available as methods of its corresponding OpenOffice.org Basic object, e.g.:

Dim oSomeInstance As Object

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create1()

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create2( 42, "Hello" )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( aVarOfAnyType )

Internally the parameters are passed to the createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext method of com.sun.star.lang.XMultiComponentFactory as Arguments sequence. The UNO default context is used both to obtain the Multi Component Factory and as Context parameter.

This is the simple version. To give more control to the user there's also another way to call service constructors similar to the one used in the C++ mapping of service constructors. In this version the UNO context can be passed explicitly to the constructor method. Then the code would look like this:

Dim oMyContext As Object

oMyContext = GetContextFromSomewhere()

Dim oSomeInstance As Object

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create1( oMyContext )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create2( oMyContext, 42, "Hello" )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext, aVarOfAnyType )

In this case the passed context is used internally instead of the UNO default context.

The OpenOffice.org Basic runtime automatically chooses the appropriate version by checking the first parameter's type. If the first parameter supports com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext and the parameter count exceeds the one of the used constructor the second version is used.

This can become a problem in one special case: If a constructor has a rest parameter and expects an object supporting XComponentContext as argument it becomes ambiguous which version should be used. It could be a call to the constructor with the intention to pass the context as an argument to the service (case 1) or with the intention to pass the context to createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext with no argument for the service (case 2).

The solution: In case 1 it doesn't matter if no or one context is passed as parameter:

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3()

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext )

oMyContext is only used for createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext and not passed as argument to the service.

For case 2 the context has to be passed twice

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext, oMyContext )

Then the second context parameter is passed to the service. This may look a little bit strange, but it's a rather exotic scenario anyway.

If a new-style service only has an implicit constructor it's mapped to a method "create" without parameters in OpenOffice.org Basic.

tags:

Vincent Spiewak has finished his OpenOffice.org extension for converting ODF text documents to DAISY Digital Talking Books - you can find the press release here.

The extension not only creates XML content, but also can make use of different text to speech engines, so you will have fully featured talking books.

I recommend this extension for everybody who wants to create DAISY books. Binaries and source files are available on sourceforge, the license is LGPL 3.

If you never heard of DAISY before, you might want to look at the screen casts which will show you how it works.

Thank you very much for this great OpenOffice.org extension!

tags: accessibility daisy odf ooo opendocument openoffice.org xml

3 seats on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are to be taken by community members to represent their constituency. After the nomination and introduction period now the 3 elections are open.

Code Contributor Representative: candidate Jürgen Schmidt seeks the support of code contributors.

Product Development Representative: candidates Christoph Noack and Alexandro Colorado strive for the majority of votes from leads of accepted projects and incubator projects.

Native Language Representative: candidate Charles-H. Schulz seeks the support of leads of native language projects.

If you are a member of one of the above mentioned constituencies you will have received an email that invites you to participate. Please cast your vote until November 16.

It looks a bit complicated but there are descriptions available about the OpenOffice.org Community Council, its charter, the election process and the candidates for the November 2009 elections.

Thanks go to the helping hands running the elections as commissary (Louis, louis@ooo) and observers (Mechtilde, mechtilde@ooo; Sophie, sgauti@ooo).

PS: If you think you should have received an invitation please drop me, the commissary and observers a note (after a look in your spam folder ;-).

tags: community council openoffice.org

As promised the results of automated tests for release workspace OOO320 starting minor m3 to m4. Explanation of testresults from OOO320m1 to OOO320m2 can be found here. As expected in previous blog the m3 had a green state as all features covered by automated tests had no issue. But unfortunately Issue 106678 put a spoke on our wheel and shredded all results in OOO320m4. Thats why this high number of errors and warnings made this build from our point of view useless. The reason why this issue wasn't found by automated tests in CWS impress180 is currently unknown. However see the graph on quality progress:

tags: automated_tests qa

tags: java odf odfdom xml

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m64 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2 (subject to change) has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m64" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/DEV300_m64_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/DEV300_m64_md5sums.txt

tags: openoffice.org qa release snapshot

Some words regarding the QA Camp last Thursday at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Orvieto, Italy:

Last Thursday many interested people met in Orvieto to talk about QA related topics. People came from all around the world.

Just to mention some of them:

Takamichi Akyiama [known as Tora] (OOo, Japan)
Shinji Enoki (OOo, Japan)
Makoto Takizawa (OOo, Japan)
André Schnabel (OOo, Germany)
Jaqueline Rahemipour (OOo, Germany)
Sophie Gautier (OOo, France)
Goran Rakic (OOo, Serbia)
Rudolf Ferenc (University of Szeged, Hungary)
Doug Bash (Seattle, USA)
Uwe Luebbers (Sun, Hamburg, Germany)

We talked about:

Quaste (a web application to compare VCL Testtool results),
QA-Track (a web application to register the release status of released builds),
Convwatch (a tool that can compare the document layout of different OOo versions via bitmap subtraction), about API/unit tests, about Automation by using the VCL Testtool, about TCM (a web application to store localized versions of test cases), about TCS (test case specifications), about the need of manual tests with input method editors (IME), about iTeams (Jaqueline talked about her experience with working together with Writer developers on a rework of the numbering feature in Writer), about CWS work (Sophie reported about her experience with CWS chartuseability01 and her work together with Chart developer Ingrid Halama). Rudlof Ferenc mentioned his team's work on OpenOffice.org source code analysis. And we talked about many many more things in detail..

All in all I think it was a very informative meeting and every attendee was able to take home new ideas and some information he/she was not aware of. The QA Camp was planned as an open house event but to my surprise most of the attendees stayed the whole three hours (!) and discussed and discussed.... :-)

I want to thank everybody making this event a success ! Especially I would like to thank the organizational team of this conference !

tags: event ooocon ooocon2009 qa

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO320_m4 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2.0 has been uploaded.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/OOO320_m4" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OOO320_m4_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/OOO320_m4_md5sums.txt

tags: openoffice.org qa release snapshot

Did you know that OOo has its own YouTube channel? Check out the interesting and informative new videos available for your viewing and listening pleasure:

Clayton Cornell live in  "OpenOffice.org - How to Contribute -
Documentation Project"

Or even better...get on the fan page in Facebook and upload a video of yourself.

You can share your personal OOo story with the world and motivate people to join the ever-growing OOo community. To make a video, you only need a computer with a webcam and the latest adobe flash player installed. To record a video on the page wall, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the page (become a Fan).
2. Select "Add Video" from the Publisher bar.
3. Record a video.
4. Click "Post."

Liz

tags: marketing