Dynamic UNOIDL Reference Browser

Dynamic UNOIDL reference Browser

Google Summer of Code project 2006

Student 

Lin Rongheng (ronghenglin at gmail.com)

Mentor 

Juergen Schmidt (juergen.schmidt at sun.com)

Abstract

The OpenOffice.org API is specified in UNOIDL (UNO Interface Definition Language). UNOIDL allows a language independent description of the API and language bindings/bridges allows the use of the same API from various languages where exactly such a language binding/bridge exists. But often it is difficult for users of the API to map the language independent UNOIDL reference documentation to their preferred and used programming language, e.g. Java or StarBasic. But exactly this would speed up their daily work, a Java programmer would like to have a Javadoc like reference of the API. The idea of a “Dynamic UNOIDL Reference Browser” is to develop a new concept for documenting IDL types in XML and a concept to provide a dynamically created representation for different languages. That means in detail that the reference browser would dynamically create a piece of XML code from the IDL definition and the provided XML documentation string for the IDL type. An appropriate XSL transformation would convert the XML representation into the required language representation. For example a Java developer gets the correct Java mapping for an IDL interface type. The dynamically approach has the advantage that we can (in a second step) analyze the navigation path to a type and can show context specific documentation. That can be very useful for generic types which have different meanings in different contexts. For example a return type of a generic type XEnumeration from function F of interface X. The generated documentation for XEnumeration would show exactly the info which is necessary to understand and use XEnumeration in the context of function F from interface X. It shows for example that the enumeration in this context always contains objects of type Y and even more information for more complex context dependent information.