User:DrewJensen\Export Manager

A user lead effort to add export feature to the current Base capabilities.

Initial work on this will admittedly one persons idea of what an export feature should offer, and how to deliver it. The intent of the original author is to involve other interested persons in the OpenOffice.org user / developer communities.

First decision to make was how to implement the functionality. OOBasic was chosen for two reasons – first, the author is most comfortable in this language – second, OOBasic is the most closely integrated scripting language for OpenOffice.org. This should allow the initial prototyping work to move at a reasonably quick pace.

The long term goal of the project would be to produce a production quality export manger as an add-on for Base. This would be a two phase process – Start with a rapidly prototyped utility and publish it to the general community for use. This steps primary goal is to gather requirements from users regarding how they then utilize the capabilities.

A second phase would be to apply the lessons learned from the prototyping and usage information from users to the design and implementation in a more appropriate scripting tool. JavaScript is the tool being favored by the original author.

This prototype phase will focus on disk file based export of rowset data from a default Base database. However, part of the effort will be to create programmatic interfaces to generate an output stream for a calling routine. The output stream would return exactly the same information that otherwise would have been sent to the disk files.

The manager will use actual export file generation capabilites proved by two basic libraries [CSV export] and [XML export].