Developing Scripts on the Command Line

For users who do not wish to develop their OpenOffice.org scripts using an IDE there is a simple command line interface built into the OpenOffice.org Scripting module which can be used for the generation and deployment of OpenOffice.org Scripts.

Contents

• Prerequisites

• The CommandLineTools class

• Examples

Prerequisites

• The Scripting module office.jar file should be included in the classpath. You can download this file from here
• The main Scripting Framework jar file ScriptFramework.jar also needs to be included in the classpath. You can find it in the program/classes directory of your OpenOffice.org installation.
• The CommandLineTools class will only work if an XML parser (such as Apache Xerces) is available in the classpath.

The CommandLineTools class

The CommandLineTools class takes the following options (Note: Options in angle brackets "<>" are required, options in square brackets "[]" are optional):

[-o Path to OpenOffice.org Installation] -g [Path to Parcel directory] [options]

Generates a Script Parcel for the given the parcel directory. The optional -o flag is used to specify that path to your OpenOffice.org installation. If it is not provided the CommandLineTools class will attempt to discover your OpenOffice.org installation and will print an error if it fails. The parcel name will be the name of the parcel directory plus the .sxp extension.

• If a parcel directory is not specified the current directory is used. If the parcel directory does not contain a directory named Contents an error message is printed. Otherwise a Script Parcel (.sxp) file is generated in the parcel directory containing all of the files under the Contents directory. The options that may be used with the -g option allow the user to specify how the parcel-descriptor.xml file for the Script Parcel is generated (see the Scripting Framework developer guide for more information on the parcel-descriptor.xml file). The following options are available:

  [-l language[=supported extension list]]

  Specifies which language attribute to use for the parcel element in the parcel-descriptor.xml file. The supported extension list is ignored if the language is Java. Otherwise all files that have one of the supported extensions (the list should be separated by the platform specific path separator, ":" on Unix, ";" on Windows) will be added as script entries to the parcel-descriptor.xml file.

  Alternatively the user can specify a list of names at the command line which will be added as scripts and no search for script names will be performed. The following table shows the behaviour of CommandLineTools when the -l flag is used:

  -l flag used?	parcel-descriptor.xml exists?	result
  no	no	error message printed
  yes	no	parcel-descriptor.xml generated parcel.sxp generated
  no	yes	parcel-descriptor.xml not generated parcel.sxp generated
  yes	yes	if language is different from parcel-descriptor.xml language, error else parcel-descriptor.xml regenerated parcel.sxp generated

  [-p name=value]

  Specifies a name value pair to be added as a language dependent property in the parcel-descriptor.xml file

  [-v]

  Specifies that verbose output should be displayed.

[-o Path to OpenOffice.org Installation] -d <Path to Script Parcel> <Target Directory|Document>

Deploys the given Script Parcel to a directory or an OpenOffice.org document. The optional -o flag is used to specify that path to your OpenOffice.org installation. If it is not provided the CommandLineTools class will attempt to discover your OpenOffice.org installation and will print an error if it fails. A directory will be created with the name of the Parcel and the contents of the Parcel will be put into that directory.

• If deploying to an OpenOffice.org installation the target directory should be the <OpenOffice.org Installation>/user/Scripts or <OpenOffice.org Installation>/share/Scripts directory. If the either the Script Parcel or the target do not exist an error message is printed. Otherwise the Script Parcel is deployed to the target.

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Examples

• java CommandLineTools -g myparceldir -l Java

  Generates a myparceldir.sxp file in myparceldir automatically exporting all public Java methods which take XScriptContext as their first parameter as OpenOffice.org scripts.

• java CommandLineTools -g -l BeanShell=.bsh

  Generates a script parcel file in the current directory automatically exporting all files that end with the .bsh extension as BeanShell scripts

• java CommandLineTools -g myparceldir -l BeanShell MyScript.bsh

  Generates a myparceldir.sxp file in myparceldir and exports MyScript.bsh as an OpenOffice.org script.

• java CommandLineTools -g myparceldir -l Java -p classpath=dep1.jar:dep2.jar

  Generates a myparceldir.sxp file in myparceldir, automatically searching for valid OpenOffice.org scripts, and adding the classpath property to each OpenOffice.org script.

• java CommandLineTools -g myparceldir -l Java -p classpath=dep1.jar:dep2.jar -p secondprop=secondvalue

  Generates a myparceldir.sxp file in myparceldir, automatically searching for valid OpenOffice.org scripts, and adding the classpath and the secondprop properties to each OpenOffice.org script.

• java CommandLineTools -d myparceldir.sxp /export/home/MyOffice/user/Scripts

  Deploys the myparceldir.sxp Script Parcel to the specified office directory.

• java CommandLineTools -g myparceldir -l JavaScript MyScript.js
  Generates a myparceldir.sxp file in myparceldir and exports MyScript.js as an OpenOffice.org script.

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Last Modified: Nov 19 2003