Re: [tdf-discuss] Macro Difficulties

Hi Charles,

Charles Jenkins schrieb:
> This is a story about the usability of LO BASIC and the documentation
> thereof. And also a plea for help.
>
> I'm trying to get LibreOffice to work with SAP Business One
> (hereafter called B1) in order to eliminate the need to pay for
> expensive licenses for Microsoft Excel.
>
> B1 has a toolbar button that's supposed to generate a spreadsheet for
> data viewed as a table onscreen. Unfortunately, instead of really
> creating a spreadsheet, B1 just dumps out a tab-separated text file
> and then opens a spreadsheet called "AutoOpen.xls" that in turn loads
> the text file into a new spreadsheet.
>
> This clunky way of doing things has the advantage that there's no
> worry about file formats. Whatever version of Excel you're running,
> it can open the text file. This method *could* work in LibreOffice
> too, but unfortunately the macro command used in AutoOpen.xls doesn't
> exist in LO BASIC. The command is Workbooks.OpenText
>
> I'm not sure if the problem is that OpenText doesn't exist, or if
> there is no Workbooks object to begin with. The documentation on LO
> BASIC is so sparse that I can't find anything about opening
> spreadsheets. The LO help file promises documentation at
> OpenOffice.org; but clicking that link takes me instead to
> https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/BASIC_Guide, which
> is a placeholder page containing only a link to another
> website--which doesn't respond.

The BASIC-Guide is still on

http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/BASIC_Guide

You might also want to look at
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Basic/OpenOffice.org_Basic

Old, but in parts still useful is "StarOffice 8 Programming Guide for 
BASIC". It is no longer available from Oracle, but you will find it on 
the web.

And you need  "IDL Reference Complete LibreOffice 4.0 API reference". It 
is in the SDK or use it online 
http://api.libreoffice.org/docs/common/ref/com/sun/star/module-ix.html



> (By the way, the help file does document an Open command, but that
> command is used to open simple data files to be processed and closed
> by the script. It doesn't cause LO to open a document in the UI.)

The help has a lot of commands, which do not fit to modern systems. The 
simple file access commands no longer work, never use them.

> After finding nothing documented, I enabled macro recording, began
> recording a macro, and used File > Open to open the text
> file/spreadsheet myself. Obviously, I was hoping to then examine the
> macro to learn what objects and functions LO uses to open files.

The macro recorder uses the dispatcher. You cannot learn from it to 
write own macros.

 But
> opening a new file causes macro recording to end without a comment,
> warning, or error…and without saving anything of the macro in
> progress.
>
> Can anyone give me clues to creating a macro which can open a
> spreadsheet?

Kind regards
Regina



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