Introduction:I'm a member of the OpenOffice Project Management Committee. Some time ago, I pushed the creation of the recruitment@ mailing list, and offered to do some mentoring of new volunteers.
The good news is that, although now retired, I am a very experienced developer. The bad news is that I am relatively new to OpenOffice development. We will be learning its implementation together.
There seems to be a critical mass of developers here, so I would like to offer you a joint project. I'm asking each person to attack this from their own point of view, using their own skills and resources. Whenever you find out anything about the problem, please post it here. The hope is that your combined skills will be even more effective than each of you could be individually.
Project:There is a difference between spreadsheet and text document behavior. The text document behavior is the more desirable. The objective is to understand why spreadsheets don't behave the same way, and fix it.
OpenOffice supports embedded OLE document links. I created each of the attached files by creating a new document and then inserting a link:
Insert -> Object -> OLE ObjectIn the dialog, pick "Create from file" radio button, enable "Link to file", and select a text file. The one I used contained the text "This is the dummy file on the Windows 10 computer", and the path to the file is c:/OpenOfficeDev/test_files/dummy.txt. If you want to use a different path, you should create your own test files.
To see the different behavior, open each file on a computer that has a file with the same path but different content. The text file original.odt asks if you want to update links. If you select "yes" you will see the content on the computer on which you are running, not the original text. The spreadsheet original.ods does not - it just uses the copy of the original text from original.ods.
I would like to get the spreadsheet to go through the same dialog as the text document.
Resources:The key for developers getting started is the build instructions at https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide_AOO/Step_by_step. Even if you don't want to actually build, you can use it for getting access to the source code.
There is an index of the source code at http://opengrok.adfinis-sygroup.org/source/ There may well be better tools for doing the same job - feel free to post suggestions here.
Some of the files contain German comments. There is a problem for those of us who do not know German. The usual solution of pasting the text into an on-line translator does not work well because of the style and jargon. Fortunately, we have some people who are fluent in both German and English, and a system for asking them to translate a specific module. If you are familiar with Bugzilla, or want to learn it, see https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=39199 If you prefer not to deal with Bugzilla at this time, post the path to the file here and I'll request translation.
Of course, ask any questions here as well as posting any results you get.
original.odt
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
original.ods
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet
