[plug] Building a GUI app to generate a wordprocessed letter

[Leon Brooks]

On Monday 10 March 2003 06:10 pm, Derek Fountain wrote:
> The requirement: user enters customer name, address, and a whole pile of
> application specific information, and the system produces a letter for them
> (confirming an appointment in this case).

> I can do the MySQL database. I can do a front end for entering data into
> it. What I don't know how to do is feed the important fields into a decent
> WP so it generates a letter.

OOo does this, IIRC through ODBC.

> Is it possible to do a
> merge-on-the-fly sort of operation in OpenOffice Writer, preferably under
> external script control?

I guess you'd pretty have to do it under *internal* script control using OOo.

As an alternative, OOo docs are just XML in a zip file, so there's nothing to 
stop you beating up the XML text with the scripting tool of your choice to 
produce (a) new document(s) with the desired properties.

I've gotten the OOo people thinking about a headless, externally scriptable 
version. The way they're going about it at the moment, *every* potential 
dialog box in the entire system has to know about being headless, but it's 
possible that they'd be able to alter the generic visual instantiator (phrase 
of the day?) to simply log dialog questions and return the default/empty 
response.

Cheers; Leon