ODFPY

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Very handy library for creating and manipulating ODF documents without any
dependency on OpenOffice.org <http://odfpy.forge.osor.eu/>.

I’ve been looking at using it for automating the generation of the invoices
I send out at the end of each month. So far, it’s been a lot easier than
trying to figure out PyUNO.

One thing, though, the examples are full of procedural sequences involving
creating an object, and then calling some other object’s addElement method
to add the new object as a child—lots of repetitive accesses to intermediate
variables. So I wrote this nice, simple convenience routine

def AddElement(Parent, Construct, Attrs, Children) :
# convenience routine for building ODF structures.
NewElt = Construct(**Attrs)
for Child in Children :
NewElt.addElement(Child)
#end for
if Parent != None :
Parent.addElement(NewElt)
#end if
return NewElt
#end AddElement

With this, I can build quite complicated structures in a single statement,
using a more functional approach, e.g.

AddElement \
(
Parent = TheDoc.text,
Construct = odf.text.P,
Attrs = dict
(
stylename = AddElement
(
Parent = TheDoc.automaticstyles,
Construct = odf.style.Style,
Attrs = dict(name = "work header", family = "paragraph"),
Children =
(
odf.style.TextProperties(fontweight = "bold"),
AddElement
(
Parent = None,
Construct = odf.style.ParagraphProperties,
Attrs = dict
(
marginbottom = "0.21cm"
),
Children =
(
AddElement
(
Parent = None,
Construct = odf.style.TabStops,
Attrs = dict(),
Children =
(
odf.style.TabStop(position = "15.1cm"),
)
),
)
),
)
)
),
Children =
(
odf.text.Span(text = "Description of Work"),
odf.text.Tab(),
odf.text.Span(text = "Charge"),
)
)