[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 89178] Mail merge does not change the merge fields in files (when saved as individual documents) to plain text

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89178

--- Comment #22 from Ben Fleming <benfleming at demotic.co.uk> ---
There have been several bugs logged on here regarding this issue, or what users
perceive it as, e.g. 54703 and duplicates of that bug which have been closed.

The issue is that for some reason, when saving to individual documents, the
outputted documents do not get "flattened" they are just copies of the
original, still connected to the data source, they just happen to have the
relevant record selected.  This is not the behaviour if the whole merge is to
one document, in which case it is all "flattened" correctly.

The users who are saying that hidden paragraphs are not working are probably
seeing this behaviour, along with having "Show hidden paragraphs" ticked in
their Writer settings.

Foe me the gotcha is that I noticed the behavour because I have a BASIC macro
that produces invoices based on a spreadsheet and/or a base database.  When I
perform this merge through the UI, the individual documents saved are
"flattened" as expected.  But doing it through UNO (BASIC), I get the version
with the fields still intact.

Jan-Marek Glogowski above mentioned speed and the belief that this incorrect
behaviour actually sped things up in his use case.  Given that the front-end
seems to have been fixed at some point to behave correctly, could there not be
a setting in the com.sun.star.text.MailMerge service with a boolean to perform
the flattening if required?  Personally I consider it a significant bug but I
bet others consider it a feature.

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