[Libreoffice] uno discoverability

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Kevin

On Tue, 2011-11-15 at 11:49 -0500, Kevin Hunter wrote:
> One of the things that I find extremely frustrating is the lack of
> discoverability from within the Python context.  The interactive shell
> (IPython package and IPython.embed() ) is an amazing tool for debugging
> and data structure discovery (with the power of tab-completion, among
> other things), but when most functions are hardly documented, it
> reduces the  discoverability to educated guesswork and actual C++
> code inspection.

	Well - there are some real issues here, inasmuch that it can't be known
until run-time what interfaces are supported, and lots of type
information disappears down the toilet around queryInterfaces and
'any's. Unfortunately, this makes the API hardly fit-for-purpose for
simple scripting use, but extending the API to make it fit (eg. by
having a flat set of implementation interfaces - complete with default
parameter types etc.) is conceptually problematic ;-)

> which is hardly useful to know what loadComponentFromURL actually does.

	But for the few bits of C++ stuff that we wrap of course it can be
easily documented. Patches most welcome.

> 2. If there is not an intentional reason, would drive by documentation 
> efforts (as I discover them, and certainly to be improved, but better 
> than nothing), be generally appreciated?

	Of course ! :-)

	All the best,

		Michael.

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