Adding fields in OpenOffice is too cumbersome

[David Burke]

I see that it's now possible to use fields instead of track changes. This makes it easy to copy and paste but adding fields (which are actually conditionally true fields) is cumbersome for the end user. One solution would be an openoffice extension to "add field". I've included this as an attachment. It prompts a dialog box asking the user for the field then places it in the document. The option will appear in Tools, Addons, Insert Field.

[Gaëtan Delannay (gaetan-delannay)]

Hi, I can't read the attachment, it is flagged as text/plain but is binary. Could you specify its file extension ?
Thanks
Gaetan Delannay

[David Burke (bufke)]

It's .oxt which is an openoffice.org extension. It's really just a basic macro for openoffice, it's easier to install the extension but you could also copy and paste this code in to a macro.

[David Burke (bufke)]

This is a problem too

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31976

From openoffice's help: You can also insert database fields in the Then and Else boxes using the format "databasename.tablename.fieldname".
If the table or the field name does not exist in a database, nothing is inserted.

It's rather reasonable to use appy with objects that may be in that format. The result is an invisible field. Is there any other type of field that could be used instead of conditional?

tl:dr I made a new version of the script that puts in quotes automatically and it works fine.

[David Burke (bufke)]

*wish I could edit: Is there any other type of field that could be used instead of conditional? Not a problem since "" fixes it.

[Gaëtan Delannay (gaetan-delannay)]

Hello,
I plan to add a param to the Renderer, smth like "podExpressionsContainer", that would take as default values ('tracked-changed-text', 'conditional-text', 'input-text'). The first value enabled POD expressions in track-changed text, all the others correspond to field types. This way, if one has already fields and/or track-changed text in his document, POD may not interpret it, as several different "containers" are possible for POD expressions. With this mechanism, you could also use yet another field type. Available soon ;-)

[Gaëtan Delannay (gaetan-delannay)]

Now another field type can be used: text-input