[Solved by 'hack'] Offer customized letter wizard templates

[digisus]

Hello

I would like to create a letter and fax template that people can access via the wizard mechanism.

When you click on <file|wizards..|letters..> you get to the window as shown in the attachment. You can choose between pre-configured templates for differernt letter types. Say, I choose a formal letter ("Geschäftsbrief"). Then I can select from the pre-configured templates in that drop-down list (you can see "Office" being selected). What I want is that people at this point can select, e.g., "Company letter (English)" and "Company Letter (German)" and then continue using the wizard to decide on which fields to include. -- At a later stage, the same should be possible with fax and presentation templates.

So, how do I create templates that are suitable for the wizard and where should I put them to make them available from the wizard?

The reason I am asking is that my letter template needs flexiblity in two ways: 1) language (currently, I think about establishing a template for each language and 2) different sender addresses: Either a person (with a name) or a department ( no person's name). For that, I am not yet sure how to do it, but that may be for another thread.

Thanks a lot for your help!

digisus
aka madmaxx (Congrats to Admins/Mods for the new forum! It looks very nice. )

[digisus]

Ooh, nobody has any idea of how that could be done?

[rileydog]

this is somehting i would also like to do. has there been any ideas regarding making a new wizard

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome, especially to digisus (madmaxx)!

In fact, the wizard is design to create templates but that's all, I don't think it's that much used because once the template is done, you just have to use it. Can yuo precise what is your need? I guess that you want the user to chose between different templates and not create a template each time, am I right? If so, you should IMHO create the templates and then either give them an explicit name so that the user can select the right one in the list or create a macro that open a dialog helping the user to select step by step what kind of template he needs.

[acknak]

I just did a test, and all I had to do was add a new template to the directory where the other templates used by the wizard are installed. The Letter Wizard picked it up and included it in the offerings.

My guess is that there are some constraints on the template names, to map them into the categories built in to the wizard. Some trial and error may be required to find what names are accepted.

E.g. the wizard template files in $OO_INSTALL/share/template/en-US/wizard/letter/en-US are named:
bus-elegant_l.ott
bus-modern_l.ott
bus-office_l.ott
off-elegant_l.ott
off-modern_l.ott
off-office_l.ott
pri-bottle_l.ott
pri-mail_l.ott
pri-marine_l.ott
pri-redline_l.ott

My guess is that the prefixes 'bus', 'off', 'pri' map to the categories Business, Formal personal, and Personal in the wizard, so your template may also need to use one of those prefixes. The rest of the name doesn't seem to matter. I modified the 'pri-mail_l.ott' file and saved it as 'pri-mailx_l.ott' and that worked.

The document title set in the template file appears as a choice in the "Page design" dropdown list in the wizard.

[digisus]

Salut Hagar, merci pour le bienvenue
Hello acknak, thanks for the clever idea with the "template hack"!

<off-topic>
You guys are incredible: How much time passed since we discussed about the moving of the forums (when, uhm..., I chickend out before the real work started)? And what do I see? Both of you having amassed thousands of posts in the new place already. You guys really rock!
I hope dealing with the website owners has been getting easier on this place. (The only drawback is the, eh, strange URL you got. How about calling the forum a "forum.openoffice.org"? )
</off-topic>

The project from where my question originated is done. But they may be interested in this new approach as suggested by acknak. Only thing is, I doubt that importing templates by the user can be handled so easily as instructing to use the template import function because users do not (should not) have easily access to $OO_INSTALL/share/template/en-US/wizard/*. But let's see...

Thanks a lot and warm greetings to all other mods and admins!
digisus

[Hagar Delest]

<off-topic>
You guys are incredible: How much time passed since we discussed about the moving of the forums (when, uhm..., I chickend out before the real work started)? And what do I see? Both of you having amassed thousands of posts in the new place already. You guys really rock!
I hope dealing with the website owners has been getting easier on this place. (The only drawback is the, eh, strange URL you got. How about calling the forum a "forum.openoffice.org"? )
</off-topic>

Well, it took some time indeed to set up this site, because we tried to restore the dialog with ed (oooforum admin) as long as possible. We agree that the new address is quite strange but it should prevent any problem since it's a ... Sun server! The admins (especially Drew and Terry) have done quite all the work and still do the maintenance and the result is rather good I think.

Back to your issue, there is something I would like to check: do you really need to create a template each time you run the wizard?