How to run multiple instances of Writer simultaneously?

[Jens Tröger]

Thank you everybody for your feedback, that was very helpful. Here’s my current working implementation:

- Spawn the soffice process which will function as a “server”

    customenvdir = tempfile.TemporaryDirectory()
    p = subprocess.Popen("soffice --accept=\"pipe,name=SOME_PIPE;url;StarOffice.ServiceManager\" --headless --invisible")

- Terminate the soffice process when I need to

    p.terminate()                                                                              
    # I assume that the pipe will be cleaned up as well?
    if customenvdir:                                                                           
        cleanup_tmp(customenvdir)                                                       

- Having soffice running, I can connect to it as usual:

    try:
        local = uno.getComponentContext()                                                           
        resolver = local.ServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext("com.sun.star.bridge.UnoUrlResolver", local)
        context = resolver.resolve("uno:pipe,name=SOME_PIPE;url;StarOffice.ComponentContext")
        desktop = context.ServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext("com.sun.star.frame.Desktop", context)
        document = desktop.loadComponentFromURL("file://…", "_blank", 0, None)
        controller = document.getCurrentController()                                                    
    except:                                                                                         
        pass # Handle

- When done with the document, "close" it down but leave the soffice process untouched and available for more. Here, I am not sure about the other resources that were allocated when documents are being loaded:

    # controller.??                                                                             
    if document:                                                                               
        # https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=75367                          
        if has_interface(document, "com.sun.star.util.XCloseable"):                            
            document.close(True)                                                               
        else:                                                                                       
            document.dispose()                                                                 
    # desktop.terminate()                                                                      
    # context.??                                                                               
    # resolver.??                                                                              
    # local.??                                                                                 

As Tor suspected, I noticed that desktop.terminate() removes access to the pipe so that others can not open documents anymore. However, it doesn't seem to terminate the soffice process itself.

Also, I have performance concerns for this approach: loading and running through just two documents simultaneously seemed to be unproportionally slow!?

Thank you!
Jens

--
Jens Tröger
http://savage.light-speed.de/