[a11y] LibreOffice Calc exposes 2^31 children, freezes on `GetChildren`

[Luuk van der Duim]

On 10-06-2024 16:37, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On 07/06/2024 14:20, Luuk van der Duim wrote:
>> Thanks for your thoughts! I will gladly expand a bit.
>
>     Let me add my 2 cents; a spreadsheet can have 10^20 rows, and 2^14 
> columns - that's 34 bits already - so even in the case that you 
> thought you wanted to iterate them all over a remote bus - you don't.
>
>     Indeed - the whole idea is madness; there was this 
> manages-descendants hack in the past to try to tag such widgets to 
> avoid iterating them.
>
>     My attempts to encourage people to expose only the visible (or 
> near visible) items in the past were not that productive; but I still 
> firmly believe this is the only sensible way to do this.

[..]

>
> > or to the visible and showing objects only.
>
>     This is IMHO the only sensible approach; thanks for suggesting it; 
> though of course it is then ideal to have some nice navigation API 
> support wrapped around that - although ... we have a lot of well-known 
> navigation keyboard shortcuts in-place of course.

Yes, sighted people only get a slice at a time too. As a rule of thumb, 
this seems logical to expose the same as that visible slice.

>
>> Could LibreOffice please limit the reply-message to something 
>> reasonably sized? (Or at least legally sized?) This is currently a 
>> bit of a foot-gun with a public interface.
>
>     Not clear to me how LibreOffice can determine the byte size of the 
> dbus message that is serialized from the data we expose ;-) and this 
> is before we get into the "whole court transcript in one paragraph" 
> horrors that plague certain types of document ;-)

That is a bit outside my wheelhouse too.

Thanks for chiming in ;)