OpenOffice::OODoc::Intro 2.027 review

OpenOffice::OODoc::Intro is a Perl module for an introduction to the Open OpenDocument Connector. The main goal of the Open OpenDo

License: Perl Artistic License File size: 211K Developer: Jean-Marie Gouarne

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OpenOffice::OODoc::Intro is a Perl module for an introduction to the Open OpenDocument Connector.

The main goal of the Open OpenDocument Connector (OODoc) is to allow quick application development in 2 areas:

- replacement of old-style, proprietary, client-based macros for intensive and non-interactive document processing;
- direct read/write operations by enterprise software on office documents, and/or document-driven applications.

OODoc provides an abstraction of the document objects and isolates the programmer from low level XML navigation, UTF8 encoding and file compression details. For example:

use OpenOffice::OODoc;
my $document = ooDocument(file => 'filename.odt');
$document->appendParagraph
(
text => 'Some new text',
style => 'Text body'
);
$document->appendTable("My Table", 6, 4);
$document->cellValue("My Table", 2, 1, "New value");
$document->save;

The script above appends a new paragraph, with given text and style, and a table with 6 lines and 4 columns, to an existing document, then inserts a value at a given position in the table. It takes much less time than the opening of the document with your favourite text processor, and can be executed without any desktop software connection. A program using this library can run without any OpenOffice.org installation (and, practically, OODoc has been tested on platforms where OpenOffice.org is not available yet).

More generally, OpenOffice::OODoc provides a lot of methods (probably most of them are not useful for you) allowing create/search/update/delete operations with document elements such as:

- ordinary text containers (paragraphs, headings, item lists); - tables and cells; - sections; - images; - styles; - page layout; - metadata (i.e. title, subject, and other general properties).

Requirements:
Perl