[Libreoffice] GSoC: Easy Hack: Make python / mail-merge debuggable

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Timo,

On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 14:00 +0200, Timo wrote:
> I am applying for the GSoC-project dealing with conversion of
> helpfiles. 

	Cool ! :-) good to see your submission.

> Before I start that project I like to help with the task to make
> mailmerge debuggable.* What action exactly makes office display a
> message ?

	Riight :-) that is tricky; I think this needs to be a GUI thing, since
most of our errors seem to happen to end-users who need to be able to
debug the problem.

>  exit() did, raise Exception did, but print did not.

	Right; and of course we have lots of windows users, who tend to get
most of the problems here, and who have no console.

>  I added a Tk messagebox in the attatched version. This requires python-tk.
> Now it prints only the human-readable errormessage-text. What does a
> prefered output look like, that can be understood easily by a user?

	Well :-) I suggest we do two things.

	First - use the UNO toolkit/ APIs to create and throw up a dialog, and
encapsulate this nicely in a python function somewhere;

	There is some sample code to read before you write your version for
this here:

	http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=9602

	It is hard to use python-tk, since we don't bundle that with
LibreOffice, and our python is typically built-in.

	So - creating a dialog popup function that will show a message and an
ok button using the UNO toolkit API would be the first step.

	From then, I guess we need to work out which pieces are most likely to
fail :-) I suppose that testing is the key piece here, you know -
dis-connecting yourself while talking to the remote server etc. etc. but
I guess the key thing is to get that dialog goodness in there, so we can
expand its use over time.

	Does that make sense ? :-)

	Thanks,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot