Libreoffice Developing Helper

This tool helps developing LibreOffice Extension. It mainly does:

• build a LibreOffice extension from source
• create the Addons.xcu file following a simple yaml conf file.
• install / uninstall extension
• create shortcut from installed extension to development files

Note that it hasn't been tested on other system than Linux.

WHY

When developing for LibreOffice, it is common to reinstall an extension to test it, which means compiling, uninstalling, installing. These tasks are quite boring. Beside, after a reinstallation, you need to create again and again some symlinks from the installation path to your code.

This command line tool helps achieving this goal.

Installation

$ pip install lo-extension-dev

Attention: this tool needs two configuration files to work !

Create in your root directory extension.yml and addons.yml to auto generate Addons.xcu files in charge of OfficeMenuBar & OfficeToolBar.

The module holds an example of these files.

Usage

To develop a LibreOffice extension, we advocate to use the following architecture. Extension code is in src/.

─ my_extension
    │   ├── addons.yml
│   ├── Addons.xcu
│   ├── extension
│   │   ├── 0.0.1
│   │   │   ├── lo-extension-testing.oxt
│   ├── extension.yml
│   ├── README.md
│   └── src
│       ├── Accelerators.xcu
│       ├── Addons.xcu
│       ├── assets
│       │   ├── avaudiologo.svg
│       │   └── sc_underline.svg
│       ├── description
│       │   ├── descr-en.txt
│       ├── description.xml
│       ├── dialogs
│       │   ├── window.xdl
│       ├── Events.xcu
│       ├── META-INF
│       │   └── manifest.xml
│       ├── Office
│       │   └── UI
│       ├── python
│       │   ├── pythonpath
│       │   └── my_macros.py
│       ├── README.md
│       └── registration
│           ├── license_en.txt
└── README.md

Once installed, a command line manage_extension is available in your terminal.

To get help, just type:

$ manage_extension -h

options:

-h, --help	show this help message and exit
-o, --open	Open installation directory
-m, --make	Make extension
-i, --install	Install extension
-u, --uninstall
	Uninstall extension
-d, --dev	Set dev shortcuts
-id, --install-dev
	Install and set dev shortcuts

Configuration files

We use two configuration files, using yaml syntax. One to generate menubar menu and toolbar menu. The second one hold the extension configuration.

extension.yml

• version : version number in format 0.0.1
• extension_name : name of your extension (no space)
• file_extension : zip or oxt
• lib : com.company.my_extension
• macros_directory : in this example, it is python. In some project, it is macros.

-addons : it shouldn't be changed. The file holding menubar & toolbar conf.

• menu_name : the label displayed in the menu bar.

addons.yml

This files has two main sections :

• OfficeMenuBar
• OfficeToolBar

You can create a submenu. Don't forget, the keys following a submenu have to be named as the function they call. It's the same logic for the OfficeToolBar.