Turning linked images into embedded images in oo

lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

I spent quite a bit of time learning the api so I could convert html into word documents using the api, but unfortunately as I can see on a note further down, no one ever addresses the fact that when you convert directly from html to anything else, the images will always be linked as urls. Unless you plan on zipping up the images with the word file, you can't get it to work in openoffice! (easily)

So having done all the work to get that far anyways, I wrote in c++ a method of linking all the images in a document. I'd like to say it works, but it manages to crash openoffice if there are more than say 20 images. I have no idea why and I don't think it is my fault, but I figured I'd post the code here as a last act of desperation in case someone can see an error I can't see. In the end it may help some other poor soul get over this hump in the future.

And if anyone can see a better way to do this, please let me know.

Basically, this function opens a document (in this case a word document), iterates through the images in the file, and uses a dispatch to link the images and change the style of the anchor for them.

pitonyak · Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 12:37 pm Post subject:

Does this still crash if the document is NOT loaded as hidden? This may affect the ability of the dispatch to function. If this does not help, then I recommend you attempt (strictly as a test measure) placing a delay after the dispatch of roughly five seconds. Again, this is ONLY as a test to see if it makes a difference.
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lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

Yeah, it crashes whether hidden or not. When visible, you can see it performing the operations like a dream ... for a couple seconds and then it freaks out. I don't know why or how to get around it. The only thing I haven't tried is converting it to another language.

And off topic, I read through your oo macros last week, very good stuff. Clarified a lot of things.

pitonyak · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 8:15 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your kind words regarding my macro document. The book is even better Smile

. A few sample chapters will be available for free. Most noteably, for your purposes, Chapter 1 should be available. It is not yet up, so I can not provide a direct link to it yet Smile

. I hear that it has already shipped so the link should be up already. Soon, very soon...

I think that the behavior is very interesting. I would like to know if the "bad" behavior is also present from Basic.

I started to write the macro in Basic, and then it occured to me that I had already done similar things in section 7.15.3 of my macro document. Can I embed or link a graphics object? Of course, I do not use a dispatch to accomplish this.

I wonder a bit about the dispose statement. Hmmm. Perhaps removeTextContent might be safer in the long run.

Does this always crash on the same image?
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SergeM · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 4:41 am Post subject:

Andrew Pitonyak,
I have already bough your book and hope to recieve it for my birthday on the 16th August ?
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lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

There is a small error in what I did above. Whenever I make a call to dispose, it apparently changes the XIndexAccess such that it lowers the count by one. As such if there were 34 images in the document, this will crash on the 18th one every time, since after it deletes 17 images, it tries to access an 18th and dispose of it, which doesn't exist. Nonetheless when I corrected this code, it still manages to crash OO at a random location during the dispatch uno:InsertGrahpic calls anyways.

I read over that section of your document again. I skipped over it originally because it dealt with GraphicObjectShapes instead of TextGraphicObjects.

Basically its impossible to insert TextGraphicObjects through the api by any method other than dispatch (it says so in the developer's guide), which is what I tried above. Since what I did above causes OO to crash randomly, obviously that's not a solution.

I'll try to do what you did in your document. I really hope this works.

lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

Ok I attempted to recreate section 7.15.3 from your macro document but I'm not having any success.

You say:
REM You can also insert this as text content if you desire.
ThisComponent.Drawpage.add(oGraph)

But xText->insertTextContent() will not accept anything but XContent and XShape is not XContent.

God I just wish someone had written an insertTextContentEmbedded() function and all this time would not have been wasted. Sad

Cybb20 · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 11:57 am Post subject:

lizinator:
I have written an example how to insert a TextGraphicsObject.
It can be found in AndrewPitonyak's document under 5.10 .

About your previous post:

lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

Yes, that is the procedure I tried to recreate in C++ but I couldn't get it to work as is.

pitonyak · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 7:48 pm Post subject:

I think that you are not committing a newbie mistake! I did some investigations using OOo 1.1.2 and it looks to me like the com.sun.star.text.GraphicObject is no longer supported. Someone, please tell me that I am mistaken on this. First, I ran a simple little test to see what document can create...

pitonyak · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 8:03 pm Post subject:

Oops, my mistake. When I was trying to create a text object, I was running from a module contained in a Calc document Embarassed

Of course, the text object shape appears to be NOT documented in the API documentation. <sigh>.
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lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

I did pull an xcontent interface from the graphicobjectshape and inserted it into the document, but it would abort abnormally afterwards. I think I found the reason why.

If the old image is inside a table (and all of mine are), it is not pulled into a xtextdocument->getText() call and therefore when you try to xText->insertTextContent with a new graphic at the getAnchor of the old image, it aborts abnormally because that xtext doesn't contain that anchor (it doesn't contain anything that is inside the table.

That means in order to finish this I now have to search for tables, then search each cell of each table for images and then change them. sigh.

lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

Nevermind I just thought of a much better idea.

instead of xText->insertTextContent(oldGraphic->getAnchor(),newgraphic,false);

I'll do

oldGraphic->getAnchor()->getText()->insertTextContent(oldGraphic->getAnchor,newgraphic,false);

lizinator · General User Joined: 02 Jul 2004 Posts: 11

Ok here is my final function for those interested.

It takes a document, searches for linked images, creates a new graphicobjectshape with a url from that image, then makes another graphicobjectshape and copies the data over from the first graphicobjectshape, then it sets the url of the original image to that of the second graphicobjectshape. Thereby embedding the image permanently in the document while losing as little formatting as possible. And yes I realize this could be a bit crisper, but its friday and I think I'll just take a nap instead.

Cybb20 · Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 1:01 pm Post subject:

lizinerator you're more than welcome.
I am pretty sure that others will be happy to see your code, because C++ examples are very rare on this forum and compared to Java examples for OOo very rare on other sites, too.
Glad that you got it working.
I hope that you still use the forum sometimes and if you've something interesting in C++ just feel free to add it to the code section.

Thanks
Christian
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