PyUNO usability improvements

[Matthew J. Francis]

On 15/06/2015 20:53, Noel Grandin wrote:

> Try this:
>     find . -name *.idl | xargs grep 'close()'
>     find . -name *.idl | xargs grep 'unlock'
> should find you a bunch like
>
> com::sun::star::connection::XConnection
> com::sun::star::connection::XBroadcaster

So, having searched a bit further along these lines,

com.sun.star.connection.XConnection
- Could technically be done, but I can't see any use of it outside the 
bridge code (where block level context management would be fairly pointless)

com.sun.star.connection.XBroadcaster
- Referenced by svx/source/table/tablemodel.cxx, but I see precisely 
zero mention of it being used in user code. No UNO service or interface 
actually declares its use. Unless anyone can come up with an actual use 
case, I'd skip it.


The more likely candidates seem to be:

com.sun.star.sdbc.XCloseable
- This one is on pretty solid ground and covers all sorts of things like 
database statements and result sets which could usefully be context 
managed at the block level

com.sun.star.frame.XModel
- As previously mentioned, locking/unlocking controllers is a pretty 
common thing to do and would benefit from the sugar. Riccardo 
Magliocchetti separately pointed out on IRC an example where he used a 
wrapper class context manager to control the closing of documents, which 
would correspond instead to a controller on com.sun.star.util.XCloseable 
- which is also implemented by document components. These two behaviours 
wouldn't happily coexist on the same object, and I think in terms of 
macro programming at least, the controller locking is more useful. As 
(com.sun.star.util.)XCloseable.close() also takes an argument, which 
couldn't be supplied using the "with obj: ..." syntax, I think this use 
case would be better dealt with by a function or class decorator if it's 
generally useful, rather than in the PyUNO core at the interface level.

com.sun.star.frame.XLayoutManager
- Could be used to lock interface updates while changing UI. I see one 
or two examples of user code using this.

com.sun.star.drawing.framework.XConfigurationController
- Possible but unsure how useful. I see one example of a user having 
(unsuccessfully) attempted to use this. It couldn't in any case be 
implemented without a working use case to test.

com.sun.star.registry.XRegistryKey
com.sun.star.registry.XSimpleRegistry
- Could be occasionally useful


Others:

com.sun.star.document.XUndoManager
- Potentially quite useful, but as with com.sun.star.util.XCloseable it 
requires an argument on the setup side, and would be better served by a 
decorator style controller


Regards
Matthew Francis