Base To-Do/New+Enhanced Form Controls

Description

Currently, we lack some more sophisticated controls for entering data into forms. This includes controls for

• Hyperlinks: This could be specialized text fields, which interpret their content as URL, means they display it in a special way, their text should be clickable, and they allow to browse for an URL.
• Multimedia Content: Currently, we only have image controls, which allow to interpret binary content found in a database as image. But additionally, we should have at least a “sound control” which allows to store sounds, and play them on request.
• Unspecified Binary Content: In addition to controls dedicated to special kinds of binary data (such as images and sounds), we should have a generic binary field, which allows to store/load BLOBs (binary large objects) from any source. This would allow the user to store any files in a database, without OOo interfering with this.
• References to Binary Content: Image as well as sound controls (if we have them) should be able to work with URLs, instead of direct binary content. At the moment, an image control can be bound to a binary field, and tries to interpret any data found in this field as image stream.
  We should allow for databases where only references (aka URLs) to images are stored, and adjust the existing image control (as well as the possibly upcoming sound control) in a way that it can be bound to a text field, interpreting the content as URL to the real data.

Except the Hyperlink control, probably all other types imply the extension of existing implementations, instead of creating new ones. This means that this project is not really self-contained, but requires some knowledge in the existing implementations, or at least the will to wade to them before doing any real work.

• required skills: C++, good knowledge of UNO, OOo's component model
• useful skills: knowledge in existing control implementation
• Contact: dev@dba.openoffice.org
• effort: 3 weeks for the hyperlink control, 4 weeks for the multimedia control, 2 week for the "unspecified binary content" control
• difficulty: high