One for the developers - .NET/Open Office

[jam1et]

We have a few users using the latest windows version of Open Office rather than MS Office. Our new web based .net application will need to automatically launch the word processor, open a template doc and send various parameters to the new document. This is no problem with MS Office but is it possible with open office?

[pdV6]

If OpenOffice has an ActiveX interface then .NET will be able to get at it.

[j_s_g]

jam1et said:

We have a few users using the latest windows version of Open Office rather than MS Office. Our new web based .net application will need to automatically launch the word processor, open a template doc and send various parameters to the new document. This is no problem with MS Office but is it possible with open office?

Only just spotted this. Here's the way things are:

.NET web-based application resides on a server as a load of ASPX pages, etc. User has IE on their desktop. You then need a page on IE to run Open Office (which is written in Java). Now, this has nothing to do with .NET, as it's an IE/client-side scripting issue. What you CAN do is have some VBScript/Javascript on the web page that launches an application (be it a java one or whatever). Your first problem will be security permissions - IE won't allow this by default, and it'll need reconfiguring.

Once you've got it launched, things'll get interesting. I'm not sure if OpenOffice has an API you can call. My guess is that it does. If not, it's "open", so you can probably extend it. These extensions/this interface will probably result in you having some small Java executable that the client-side script within IE launches. This in turn will then interact with OpenOffice to do what you're wanting.

So, to sum it up: Free software costs more.