Working with Text Documents

This section is about working with the Writer component. It builds upon the material covered in Extensions_development_basic and the generic guides in the CookBook.

Cursors

To work within a text document typically involves the Current selection, the View cursor or a not visible Text cursor. All of them provide access to TextRange objects, which provide methods for changing the text.

The differences between them is summarised in the following table:

	Current selection	View cursor	Text cursor
Typical command	oCurSelection = thisComponent.getCurrentSelection	oVC = thisComponent.getCurrentController.getViewCursor	oCursor = oVC.getText.createTextCursorByRange(oVC)
Main service	TextRanges	TextViewCursor	TextCursor
Object returned	Array of selected text ranges	The insertion point or a single text selection	A single text selection
Number in frame	One array	One only	As many as required
Movement	(By view cursor)	By Characters, Lines, and Pages	By Characters, Words, Sentences, and Paragraphs
Cookbook page	Current selection	View cursor	Text cursor

(I have not been able to work out how to select more than one block of text using code other than using the method FindAll. Although it is possible to record a current multiple selection, move the view cursor, and reselect the original multiple selection. See View cursor. If you know how to do this please edit this page!)

Text Ranges

TextRange