Dialog Dump

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Revision as of 10:10, 1 September 2006 by Frank Schoenheit (Talk | contribs)

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Introduction

Every OpenOffice.org developer who ever needed to create a VCL dialog knows that this can be a ... laborious procedure: You need to

  • define your dialog, with a text editor, in a resource file (.src), including manual maintainance of control sizes and positions
  • define the IDs for your dialog's elements in a separate .hrc file
  • create a class definition for your dialog in yet another .hxx file
  • create an initial class implementation in a .cxx file

All of this is laborious, cumbersome, and not really fun to do.

dialogdump is a Java tool which relieves you from some of those tasks, by dumping UNO dialogs to source code. This way, you can create your dialogs in the OpenOffice.org Dialog Editor (Tools / Macros / Organize Dialogs ...), and let dialogdump create all 4 files with initial content - ready to be compiled.

Get it

dialogdump is currently not available for direct download. You can check it out from CVS, it's in the module awttools of the gsl project:

 cvs checkout gsl/awttools

(If you're unfamilar with how to check out source code from CVS, refer to the documentation)

After you have the source, create a NetBeans project:

  • choose File / New Project ... from the menu
  • choose General / Java Project with Existing Sources in the "New Project" dialog
  • on the second page of the dialog, give your project a name and location
  • on the third page of the dialog, add the awttools/java directory, in the location where you just checked out the module, to the "Source Package Folders" list.
  • Finally, in the project properties, add the ridl.jar, unoil.jar, jurt.jar, juh.jar, jut.jar, java_uno.jar files, to be found in your OpenOffice.org installation in the program/classes folder, to the Compile-time Libraries list.

Use it

General

Start OpenOffice.org, by allowing it to accept incoming connections from localhost, on port 8100:

 soffice --accept=socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp

Then, simply run dialogdump from the command line, or from within the NetBeans IDE, if you have set up a project as described in the previous chapter.

Just pass the names of the dialogs you want to dump as arguments when calling dialogdump:

 dialogdump [switches] <dialog_name_1> [<dialog_name_2> [<dialog_name_3> ... ]]

(in NetBeans, this is the "Run" section in the project properties)

Choosing the Dialogs

A dialog name is composed of the module, plus the actual name. So, for instance

 dialogdump Standard.MyDialog

will dump the dialog named "MyDialog" in the application-wide module "Standard"

If you want to dump dialogs which are not application-wide, but part of a document, use the --document switch:

 dialogdump --document "c:\documents\dialog designs.odt" Demos.HelloWorld

will dump the dialog named "HelloWorld", located in the "Demos" module in the document "c:\documents\dialog designs.odt".

Important.png Currently, you must have opened the document in question in OpenOffice.org, before you can dump the contained dialogs.

Output

By default, all output happens on the console. You can override this with the --file switch:

 dialogdump --file c:\source\hello Demos.HelloWorld Demos.SimpleInput

will create the following files:

  • c:\source\hello.hrc - contains the resource identifier definitions
  • c:\source\hello.src - contains the resource definitions
  • c:\source\hello.hxx - contains the class declarations
  • c:\source\hello.cxx - contains the class implementations

All those files will be ready to compile - place them in a directory of your choice, and add them to the respective makefile. Note, however, that you certainly want to tweak the files:

  • The identifiers for the global dialogs are placed in the .hrc file, but this is not their proper place. You should move them to the central .hrc file for your complete source module, where you collect all global resouce identifiers for the module.
  • The dialog classes are constructed as follows

[c++] HelloWorldDialog::HelloWorldDialog( Window* _pParent )

 :ModalDialog( _pParent, ResId( DLG_HELLO_WORLD ) )
 ...

Note that there is a ResId in the call to the ModalDialog constructor. You will want to replace this with the resource-id-class for your module.

In general, look for // TODO: in the generated files - this will tell you placed you need to tweak.

Tweaks

dialogdump features more settings than the ones currently available at the command line. In particular, those are

setting meaning allowed values default
host specifies the machine at which OpenOffice.org is running n/a localhost
port specifies the port at which OpenOffice.org is accepting connections n/a 8100
format specifies the output format. Currently, only one format is supported, but one imagine more formats, e.g. dumping the dialogs as Java code. "VCL" "VCL"
dialog-type specifies the VCL type of the dialog(s) to dump. Only used when format is "VCL" "ModalDialog", "ModelessDialog", "TabPage" "ModalDialog"
namespace specifies the namespace in which the dialog's declaration and implementation should reside. Only used when format is "VCL" n/a <none>
global-resource-base specifies the base id for global resource identifiers. Only used when format is "VCL" n/a 256
resource-id-class specifies the class for global resource ids. Only used when format is "VCL" n/a ResId


Things to Know

When designing the dialogs, it might be helpful to keep the following in mind:

Identifiers: Resource identifiers, as well as member names, as well as dialog class names, are derived from the Name property, and the type of the control/dialog. For example, consider a dialog which you named "HelloWorld", with a fixed text control named "Message". Then, you would get

  • a dialog class named HelloWorldDialog, or HelloWorldPage if you set the dialog-type setting to "TabPage"
  • a member Edit m_aMessage
  • a dialog resource id DLG_HELLO_WORLD, or TP_HELLO_WORLD if you set the dialog-type setting to "TabPage"
  • a member resource id ED_MESSAGE

Known Limitations

  • Currently, not all control types are supported, but only those I needed so far. New types should be fairly easy to add, just see the WindowClassFactory.impl_createControlClass method.
  • Not all properties which you can set at the dialog editor are currently exported. In general, properties are exported into the .src file where possible, and into the .cxx otherwise. However, the list is not complete currently. See the RuntimePropertyValues class for an extension.
  • Properties for the dialog as a whole are currently not dumped (except Title, Position, Size)
  • If dialogs contained in documents are to be dumped, those documents must already be loaded in OOo. It would be possible to work around this in the dialogdump code, but isn't this a bug^Wmissing feature in the XDialogProvider implementation?

Possible Enhancements

Minor
  • load additional settings from a .properties file
  • allow changing all settings from the command line
  • create makefiles so the project can be built inside an OpenOffice.org build environment
  • order identifiers in the .hrc file by type, with an own numbering for each type, i.e., for every control type, ids should start with 1. Currently, all types are mixed.
  • automatically load documents in which dialogs are located.
Major
  • allow re-using files. That is, when you edit a dialog in the dialog editor, and call dialogdump again, then it could be able to recognize its previous dump, and only overwrite the changed aspects
  • reverse-engineering :) - allow creating UNO dialogs from resource files

Known Issues

  • MultiLine edit controls are not properly exported currently
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