Simplified Libreoffice API

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Rodolfo,

On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 00:35 -0300, Rodolfo wrote:
> I do agree.
> Maybe we should start this designing the API, should we?
> Something easy to fetch/insert data and formatting them.

	I think a better approach is to re-use the existing compatibility API
that we implement and expose it into StarBasic in some pleasant way; it
should be possible to do things like:

	ActiveSheet.Range("A1") = 3

	for example - and get something useful; currently it's necessary to
enable a compatibility mode with a setting in each file to get that
going, and then mixing in old-style UNO APIs for missing pieces is
harder, but ...

	Re-using, extending and improving our interoperable API there makes
much more sense (to me) than creating yet-another binding :-)

	How does that sound ? Noel would be able to give some pointers there.

	Failing that - IMHO we need to move away from a 'pure generic
interface' approach with UNO, and move towards more of using interfaces
to expose an object hierarchy - and annotating those interfaces with
more information: defaults for parameters, default-methods, etc. to make
the scripting bindings truly useful. That would make UNO
object-interfaces more usable from other languages like C++ too since
currently for optional / defaulting arguments we have to use the 'Any'
type - which makes our VBA API nightmarish for C++ users & => not a
suitable replacement.

	ATB,

		Michael.

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