Base To-Do/Dialogs with Form Functionality

Description

When creating a form, the user always needs to bother with a Writer document. Very often, this is much too oversized. It would be sufficient to have a simple dialog which contains all the data access controls.

The advantage would be to not slay the user with things she does not bother – a writer document offers a lot of possibilities which are not relevant for a form. In some cases, a full writer document does even contradict to what users expect from a form – one thing to mention here is that documents are always freely sizable, which is nothing you expect from a carefully designed form, where controls are placed at concrete positions and have a fixed size.

The project is to - extend the dialog runtime engine to (optionally) include data-aware form controls - create a form designer for dialog-based forms (similar to the existing Basic Dialog IDE) - implement persistence of dialog-based forms - embed dialog-based forms into database documents (.odb)

Depending on more fine-grained planning, it might become apparent that not all of this can be done in the scope of a Google Summer of Code project, and reasonable milestones need to be defined.

• required skills C++, UNO
• useful skills: familiarity with OOo's database access and form API, as well as OOo's toolkit API
• Contact: mailto:dev@dba.openoffice.org
• estimated effort: 3 months
• difficulty: high