Hacking Calc - The First Step

Introduction

So, you have decided that you want to hack OpenOffice.org (OO.o) Calc to fix a bug that's been annoying you to death, or to enhance a functionality that you believe is not as good as it can be, or perhaps to improve performance and reduce memory footprint. Whatever your reason may be, you need to know where to start if you don't have any prior experience with OO.o's codebase. The best way to become familiar with the codebase is to simply do a lot of experimentation; modify the code and see what change it makes. There is probably a lot of trials and error involved at first, but hopefully this guide will provide you first-time OO.o hackers with help on modifying Calc to achieve some cool stuff.

Who this guide is for

This guide is intended for C++ programmers who are already familiar with how to download the source code from CVS and do a complete build, and perhaps to do a rebuild of an individual module. If you aren't, then the Tools project homepage may be a good starting point. Don't forget to visit the infamous Hacking page to get a general overview of how the build system works, and how to work with it.

This guide is, however, not intended for someone who wants to develop an add-on component to OO.o by using the UNO component technology. There is a number of good articles on that all over the web, but perhaps one may want to start with this page first.

Brief Summary of Calc's Class Structure

Document and View

Relationship between ScViewData, ScDocument, and the subclasses of ScTabView.

Calc's class structure is built around two core classes named ScTabView and ScDocument, which, as somewhat evident in their class name, represent Calc's view and document components, respectively. If you are familiar with the concept of model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, this architectural pattern probably sounds familiar. The controller component of the MVC architecture is absent in Calc's class structure, however, as its role is covered by the underlying graphic sub-system layer (vcl module) where user inputs (mouse and keyboard inputs) are captured and sent to each application as event objects.

Another important class to note here is ScViewData, whose primary role is to serve as the persistent storage of view data, with the secondary role being the liaison between the document and view classes. Since ScTabView is the owner of the only instance of ScViewData, all of its child classes1 can get easy access to ScViewData by simply calling their inherited GetViewData() call.

The following diagram outlines the relationships between the main view classes which are subclasses of ScTabView, the ScViewData class, and the ScDocument class. The ScDocument class is the top-most class of the document class hierarchy, which is discussed in detail in the next section. The vertical arrows indicate class inheritance, whereas the horizontal arrows indicate usage with a getter function name.

Document Structure

ScDocument class represents the spreadsheet document as a whole, and it owns a static-size array of pointers to ScTable instances which are allocated dynamically on the heap, though the array itself is allocated on the stack. Internally, Calc's 2-dimensional sheet structure is column-first and row-second; the sheet is first partitioned into a fix number of columns (256 columns as of version 2.0), and each column instance has a varying number of cell instances.

While memory is allocated statically for the column instances when a ScTable object is instantiated, individual cell instances are dynamically allocated or deallocated as they are filled or emptied. Now, the allocated cells that are contiguous in memory do not necessarily represent contiguous cells on screen; even if the non-empty cells are sparsely positioned on screen (e.g. cells at row 1 and 100 contain data, but the cells at rows 2-99 are empty), their locations in memory are contiguous, and Calc uses a specialized lookup algorithm to retrieve its memory location from the row ID of a cell. See ScColumn::Search() method for the actual implementation of this lookup algorithm (located in source/core/data/column.cxx).

This mechanism helps to keep the size of memory footprint low for a sheet with only sparsely-populated cells, independent of their row position (i.e. it makes no difference memory-footprint-wise whether the non-empty cell is at row 1 or at row 65535).

Every non-empty cell can be one of five types: value cell, string cell, formula cell, note cell, and edit cell. These cell types are represented by the following classes, respectively: ScValueCell, ScStringCell, ScFormulaCell, ScNoteCell, and ScEditCell. All of these classes are derived from the common base class named ScBaseCell, so that each ScColumn object can store any types of cells simply by storing them as ScBaseCell. This is a classic example of C++'s polymorphism at work.

Built-in Cell Functions

The majority of Calc's built-in functions are implemented in class ScInterpreter, though some are implemented in the separate scaddins module. This class is instantiated by ScFormulaCell to evaluate a function, or functions, typed into the cell formula. Class ScTokenArray is used to break up a nested formula expression into separate tokens so that the tokens are evaluated in the right RPN order.

Calc's document model structure

Hacking the code

Part 1 – Modify built-in cell function

Now that we've covered the basics of Calc's internal structure, let's start getting into the code and start making some changes. First, change directory into sc/source/core/tool/ and open the file named interpr4.cxx. Do a string search in your favorite editor to find the following function

 void ScInterpreter::ScCalcTeam()
 {
     static BOOL bShown = FALSE;
     if( !bShown )
     {
         ShowTheTeam();
         String aTeam( RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM( "Ballach, Nebel, Rentz, Rathke, Marmion" ) );
         if ( (GetByte() == 1) && ::rtl::math::approxEqual( GetDouble(), 1996) )
             aTeam.AppendAscii( "   (a word with 'B': -Olk, -Nietsch, -Daeumling)" );
         PushString( aTeam );
         bShown = TRUE;
     }
     else
         PushInt( 42 );
 }

This is the implementation of the built-in function STARCALCTEAM(), which normally shows a nice picture of five, somewhat familiar-looking gentlemen on the first call, and the number 42 on the subsequent calls. Let's add two new lines to the top of this definition

 void ScInterpreter::ScCalcTeam()
 {
     PushDouble( GetByte() );
     return;
 
     static BOOL bShown = FALSE;

and save the file and re-build the sc module. After you swap the existing sc shared library named libsc680li.so in the install directory with the new one you just built, start up Calc and type =STARCALCTEAM(...) with a various number of function arguments. You should get the number of parameters to this function as its return value. The GetByte() method here returns the number of parameters passed to a current built-in function, so essentially the above code simply returns that as the return value of STARCALCTEAM().

Let's do another one while we're on the roll.

Part 2 – Adding callback to mouse click event

This time, we are going to intercept a triple-click mouse event and do something for that event. Let's make it so that it will select all cells from A1 to the current cursor position when triple-clicked. We'll call this new feature a "triple click select".

Open the file located in sc/source/ui/view/gridwin.cxx, and do a string search to locate the method named ScGridWindow::HandleMouseButtonDown(...).3 About 40 lines into the definition of this method you'll see the following if-statement block

 if (pScMod->IsModalMode(pViewData->GetSfxDocShell()))
 {
     Sound::Beep();
     return;
 }

Let's add the following block of code after this block

 if ( rMEvt.GetClicks() == 3 )
 {
     // Triple-click received.
     pViewData->GetView()->TripleClickSelect();
     return;
 }

With this code, a triple mouse-click event will get intercepted and the method named TripleClickSelect() will get called to handle the event. Since the method GetView() returns a pointer to the instance of ScDBFunc class, all we need to do now is to implement TripleClickSelect() in one of ScDBFunc's base classes so that that method will be visible to ScDBFunc. Since this triple-click-select feature is not exactly a DB related functionality, we'll add it to its immediate base class ScViewFunc.

First we need to add its prototype to the header file of ScViewFunc. The header file is located in sc/source/ui/inc/viewfunc.hxx. Open it in your editor, and add the following declaration

 void                  TripleClickSelect();

and make sure that it's a public method because we need to have another class calling it. Ok. We now have the prototype. So let's add its definition. All method definitions of ScViewFunc are found in files named viewfunc.cxx, viewfun2.cxx, ..., viewfun7.cxx. Though it makes absolutely no difference in which file to add the definition of TripleClickSelect, let's just pick the last file in the series. Change directory into sc/source/ui/view and open viewfun7.cxx. Once open, move to the very end of the file and add the following code

 void ScViewFunc::TripleClickSelect()
 {
     ScViewData* pViewData = GetViewData(); // get pointer to ScViewData
 
     // get the position of the current curosr
     SCTAB nTab = pViewData->GetTabNo();    // get sheet index
     SCCOL nCol = pViewData->GetCurX();     // get column index
     SCROW nRow = pViewData->GetCurY();     // get row index
 
     ScMarkData& rMark = pViewData->GetMarkData();
     if ( rMark.IsMarked() )
     {
         // Don't mark twice if already marked.
         ScRange aMarkRange;
         rMark.GetMarkArea( aMarkRange );
         if ( aMarkRange == ScRange(0, 0, nTab, nCol, nRow, nTab) )
             return;
     }
 
     // Do the selection.
     DoneBlockMode(); // finish previous selection if any
     InitBlockMode( 0, 0, nTab );
     MarkCursor( nCol, nRow, nTab );
     SelectionChanged();
 }

When you're done, save the file, rebuild the sc module and swap the shared library as you did in Part 1. Now, start up Calc and see what a triple-click on a randomly-picked cell does. Pretty cool, huh?

Now that we've implemented this nifty new feature, let's go over this code to see how we actually implemented it First and foremost, we need to know the current position of the cursor. Since ScViewData keeps track of current cursor positions, we need to get a pointer to the instance of ScViewData first.

     ScViewData* pViewData = GetViewData(); // get pointer to ScViewData

Now that we have the pointer, let's query the current position of the cursor. Here, you need to get three values; the column position, row position, and the sheet index, all of which are available from ScViewData.

     // get the position of the current cursor
     SCTAB nTab = pViewData->GetTabNo();    // get sheet index
     SCCOL nCol = pViewData->GetCurX();     // get column index
     SCROW nRow = pViewData->GetCurY();     // get row index

SCTAB, SCCOL, and SCROW are integer data types meant for sheet index, column index, and row index, respectively. As of 2.0.2, SCTAB and SCCOL are typedef's to 16-bit integer, and SCROW is typedef to 32-bit integer.

The next if-statement block is there to avoid redundant selection when the desired cell range is already selected.

     ScMarkData& rMark = pViewData->GetMarkData();
     if ( rMark.IsMarked() )
     {
         // Don't mark twice if already marked.
         ScRange aMarkRange;
         rMark.GetMarkArea( aMarkRange );
         if ( aMarkRange == ScRange(0, 0, nTab, nCol, nRow, nTab) )
             return;
     }

Notice how we query the ScViewData instance again for a currently selected cell range. If there is already a selected cell range, we check its position and size to see if it matches the geometry of our target cell range. If it does, then simply return to the calling function because we don't want to select the same range twice.

The last code block does the actual highlighting of a cell range. Let's go over it line by line.

     // Do the selection.
     DoneBlockMode(); // finish previous selection if any
     InitBlockMode( 0, 0, nTab );
     MarkCursor( nCol, nRow, nTab );
     SelectionChanged();

The first call DoneBlockMode ends a pre-existing selection (if any). This is a standard Calc behavior; when a new selection is made, the previously selected region must be un-selected unless the lock selection mode is on (i.e. Ctrl key is pressed). The next call InitBlockMode initiates a block selection mode with the anchor set to A1, and the following MarkCursor call moves the cursor to the current cursor location with the block selection mode still on. The last call SelectionChanged notifies Calc that the block selection is complete so that Calc can now perform post-processing operations associated with a cell-selection change.

That's it. We're done!

Now it's your turn!

If you've followed this guide up to this point, then you probably have a good glimpse of what it's like to hack this fabulous spreadsheet program. Although we did not cover all aspects of Calc's internals due to space constraints, we're hopeful that you've gained enough hands-on experience to get a good jump start. Now it's your turn to extend Calc into an even more fabulous spreadsheet program!

If you have any questions, be sure to ask us on [1]. Hope to see you there!