OOoPy: Modify OpenOffice.org documents in Python
Project description
OpenOffice.org (OOo) documents are ZIP archives containing several XML files. Therefore it is easy to inspect, create, or modify OOo documents. OOoPy is a library in Python for these tasks with OOo documents. To not reinvent the wheel, OOoPy uses an existing XML library, ElementTree by Fredrik Lundh. OOoPy is a thin wrapper around ElementTree using Python’s ZipFile to read and write OOo documents.
In addition to being a wrapper for ElementTree, OOoPy contains a framework for applying XML transforms to OOo documents. Several Transforms for OOo documents exist, e.g., for changing OOo fields (OOo Insert-Fields menu) or using OOo fields for a mail merge application. Some other transformations for modifying OOo settings and meta information are also given as examples.
Applications like this come in handy in applications where calling native OOo is not an option, e.g., in server-side Web applications.
If the mailmerge transform doesn’t work for your document: The OOo format is well documented but there are ordering constraints in the body of an OOo document. I’ve not yet figured out all the tags and their order in the OOo body. Individual elements in an OOo document (like e.g., frames, sections, tables) need to have their own unique names. After a mailmerge, there are duplicate names for some items. So far I’m renumbering only frames, sections, and tables. See the renumber objects at the end of ooopy/Transforms.py. So if you encounter missing parts of the mailmerged document, check if there are some renumberings missing or send me a bug report.
There is currently not much documentation except for a python doctest in OOoPy.py and Transformer.py and the command-line utilities. For running these test, after installing ooopy (assuming here you installed using python2.4 into /usr/local):
cd /usr/local/share/ooopy python2.4 run_doctest.py /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ooopy/Transformer.py python2.4 run_doctest.py /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ooopy/OOoPy.py
Both should report no failed tests. For running the doctest on python2.3 with the metaclass trickery of autosuper, see the file run_doctest.py. For later versions of python the bug in doctest is already fixed.
Usage
There were some slight changes to the API when supporting the open document format introduced with OOo 2.0. See below if you get a traceback when upgrading from an old version.
See the online documentation, e.g.:
% python >>> from ooopy.OOoPy import OOoPy >>> help (OOoPy) >>> from ooopy.Transformer import Transformer >>> help (Transformer)
Help, I’m getting an AssertionError traceback from Transformer, e.g.:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./replace.py", line 17, in ?
t = Transformer(Field_Replace(replace = replace_dictionary))
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ooopy/Transformer.py", line 1226, in __init__
assert (mimetype in mimetypes)
AssertionError
The API changed slightly when implementing handling of different versions of OOo files. Now the first parameter you pass to the Transformer constructor is the mimetype of the OpenOffice.org document you intend to transform. The mimetype can be fetched from another opened OOo document, e.g.:
ooo = OOoPy (infile = 'test.odt', outfile = 'test_out.odt') t = Transformer(ooo.mimetype, ...
Usage of Command-Line Utilities
A, well, there are command-line utilities now:
ooo_cat for concatenating several OOo files into one
ooo_grep to do equivalent of grep -l on OOo files – only runs on Unix-like operating systems, probably only with the GNU version of grep (it’s a shell-script using ooo_cat)
ooo_fieldreplace for replacing fields in an OOo document
ooo_mailmerge for doing a mailmerge from a template OOo document and a CSV (comma separated values) input
ooo_as_text for getting the text from an OOo-File (e.g., for doing a “grep” on the output).
ooo_prettyxml for pretty-printing the XML nodes of one of the XML files inside an OOo document. Mainly useful for debugging.
All utilities take a --help option.
Resources
Project information and download from Sourceforge main page
You need at least version 2.3 of python.
For using OOoPy with Python versions below 2.5, you need to download and install the ElementTree Library by Fredrik Lundh. For documentation about the OOo XML file format, see the book by J. David Eisenberg called OASIS OpenDocument Essentials which is under the Gnu Free Documentation License and is also available in print. For a reference document you may want to check out the XML File Format Specification (PDF) by OpenOffice.org.
A german page for OOoPy exists at runtux.com
Reporting Bugs
Please use the Sourceforge Bug Tracker and
attach the OOo document that reproduces your problem
give a short description of what you think is the correct behaviour
give a description of the observed behaviour
tell me exactly what you did.
Changes
Version 1.6: Minor bugfixes
Fix compression: when writing new XML-files these would be stored instead of compressed in the OOo zip-file resulting in big documents. Thanks to Hans-Peter Jansen for the patch. Add copyright notice to command-line utils (SF Bug 2650042). Fix mailmerge for OOo 3.X lists (SF Bug 2949643).
fix compression flag, patch by Hans-Peter Jansen
add regression test to check for compression
now release ooo_prettyxml – I’ve used this for testing for quite some time, may be useful to others
Add copyright (LGPL) notice to command-line utilities, fixes SF Bug 2650042
OOo 3.X adds xml:id tags to lists, we now renumber these in the mailmerge app., fixes SF Bug 2949643
Version 1.5: Minor feature enhancements
Add ooo_grep to search for OOo files containing a pattern. Thanks to Mathieu Chauvinc for the reporting the problems with modified manifest.xml. Support python2.6, thanks to Erik Myllymaki for reporting and anonymous contributor(s) for confirming the bug.
New shell-script ooo_grep (does equivalent to grep -l on OOo Files)
On deletion of an OOoPy object close it explicitly (uses __del__)
Ensure mimetype is the first element in the resulting archive, seems OOo is picky about this.
When modifying the manifest the resulting .odt file could not be opened by OOo. So when modifying manifest make sure the manifest namespace is named “manifest” not something auto-generated by ElementTree. I consider this a bug in OOo to require this. This now uses the _namespace_map of ElementTree and uses the same names as OOo for all namespaces. The META-INF/manifest.xml is now in the list of files to which Transforms can be applied.
When modifying (or creating) archive members, we create the OOo archive as if it was a DOS system (type fat) and ensure we use the current date/time (UTC). This also fixes problems with file permissions on newer versions of pythons ZipFile.
Fix for python2.6 behavior that __init__ of object may not take any arguments. Fixes SF Bug 2948617.
Finally – since OOoPy is in production in some projects – change the development status to “Production/Stable”.
Version 1.4: Minor bugfixes
Fix Doctest to hopefully run on windows. Thanks to Dani Budinova for testing thoroughly under windows.
Open output-files in “wb” mode instead of “w” in doctest to not create corrupt OOo documents on windows.
Use double quotes for arguments when calling system, single quotes don’t seem to work on windows.
Dont use redirection when calling system, use -i option for input file instead. Redirection seems to be a problem on windows.
Explicitly call the python-interpreter, running a script directly is not supported on windows.
Version 1.3: Minor bugfixes
Regression-test failed because some files were not distributed. Fixes SF Bugs 1970389 and 1972900.
Fix MANIFEST.in to include all files needed for regression test (doctest).
Version 1.2: Major feature enhancements
Add ooo_fieldreplace, ooo_cat, ooo_mailmerge command-line utilities. Fix ooo_as_text to allow specification of output-file. Note that handling of non-seekable input/output (pipes) for command-line utils will work only starting with python2.5. Minor bug-fix when concatenating documents.
Fix _divide (used for dividing body into parts that must keep sequence). If one of the sections was empty, body parts would change sequence.
Fix handling of cases where we don’t have a paragraph (only list) elements
Implement ooo_cat
Fix ooo_as_text to include more command-line handling
Fix reading/writing stdin/stdout for command-line utilities, this will work reliably (reading/writing non-seekable input/output like, e.g., pipes) only with python2.5
implement ooo_fieldreplace and ooo_mailmerge
Version 1.1: Minor bugfixes
Small Documentation changes
Fix css stylesheet
Link to SF logo for Homepage
Link to other information updated
Version numbers in documentation fixed
Add some checks for new API – first parameter of Transformer is checked now
Ship files needed for running the doctest and explain how to run it
Usage section
Version 1.0: Major feature enhancements
Now works with version 2.X of OpenOffice.org. Minor API changes.
Tested with python 2.3, 2.4, 2.5
OOoPy now works for OOo version 1.X and version 2.X
New attribute mimetype of OOoPy – this is automatically set when reading a document, and should be set when writing one.
renumber_all, get_meta, set_meta are now factory functions that take the mimetype of the open office document as a parameter.
Since renumber_all is now a function it will (correctly) restart numbering for each new Attribute_Access instance it returns.
Built-in elementtree support from python2.5 is used if available
Fix bug in optimisation of original document for concatenation
