Helperapi
From Apache OpenOffice Wiki
As you may have read Sun has kindly donated it's compatibility helperapi that was part of the macro migration toolkit.
Contents
How is it different from oovbaapi
- written in Java
- supports both word and excel
- has a nice set of test documents
Why ditch the helperapi and use the oovbaapi from ooo-build written in C++
- hard to track memory and performance problems across language and bridge boundaries
- the existing uno api ( e.g. for calc and writer ) does not provide enough functionality.
- The existing applications ( calc & writer ) and the basic runtime are written in C++ and as such its easier to interact at a lower level using c++. The alternative is to expose the bits need via uno, that itself is not a trivial task.
How is it structured
Useful directories
- basic: provides some global functions written in basic to bootstrap the api
- com: idl subsytem
- impl: java implementation
- test_documents: a set of documents ( excel and word )
- util/constants: generated building of uno constants
What pieces are worth porting?
- the auto generation of the constants type library
- constants are autogenerated form the *.api files located in the util/ms_api directory
- the object implementations themselves. see the porting example
- the testdocuments
- a nice test harness infrastructure is necessary to help track progress, highlight known errors and indicate any regressions. The test documents which are both word and excel documents already include a test framework for logging the test results in log files. Whats missing is the infrastructure to run these tests automatically and compare the test results and a 'known' expected result.