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Embed custom content in OpenDocument format

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:26 pm
by daune_jf
Hi all,

does anybody know if it is allowed to embed custom content (from custom schema) to content.xml, and if so, to which tags?

It is, IMHO, a strong point of M$ OOXML, and from the OpenDocument standard, I can't find much info about this.

Cheers,

J-F

Re: Embed custom content in OpenDocument format

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 5:03 pm
by r4zoli
I'm not sure about your question, but I think you ask about ODF 1.2 and metadata capabilities of OOo.
You could read more in http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/new ... pport_with. The metadata will be in OOo 3.0, which will be out around September 2008.

Re: Embed custom content in OpenDocument format

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 6:16 pm
by acknak
Just out of curiosity, what is the purpose?

Can MS Office work with the custom XML, or is it your data "just along for the ride", so to speak?

I believe it is possible (but not convenient) to add data files to the ODF container, but of course OOo will not be able to do anything with such data.

Also, the XML forms support in OOo allow you to use and store custom XML data.

Re: Embed custom content in OpenDocument format

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:04 am
by DrewJensen
Well, OO.o out of the box might not be able to use this new data, but one could conceive of extensions to the package that could use additional data, or metadata, in a document for new functionality. An OO.o installation that did not have the extension would just ignore it.

Re: Embed custom content in OpenDocument format

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:18 pm
by sybille
DrewJensen wrote:Well, OO.o out of the box might not be able to use this new data, but one could conceive of extensions to the package that could use additional data, or metadata, in a document for new functionality.
For an example of this, you might take a look at what ODF-SVN is doing.

ODF-SVN is a project to integrate version control using Subversion into ODF and is an update to the OOoSVN extension. As I understand it, they are using python to embed the version information into the XML of files. For example, see this thread:
odfsvn stores all repository information in the ODF metadata, which means that you do not need to configure anything on your system: all necessary information is already contained in the document.
That said, I believe ODF-SVN is using meta.xml rather than content.xml, if that makes a difference. But I don't think so, at least in principle - see the following: http://opendocument.xml.org/node/131