EN/api/to-dos

Here you can find a list of ongoing or new to-dos in the area of the API project. If you are interested to help in this project please take a closer look on tihs list. Maybe you can find something interesting or if not please contact the project owner Jürgen Schmidt for more ideas or information. The single to-dos are flagged to show the degree of difficulty.

easy	should be quite easy, maybe some initial time is necessary to get some domain knowledge of the specific topic. But in general easy even for beginners
experienced	for this to-dos a good base knowledge of the domain area where this to-do belongs to is helpful or required
advanced	you should have advanced knowledge of the domain area where the to-dos belongs to

New Code Snippets

easy

Our famous Code Snippet Base always needs help. We are always looking for new snippets or translations of existing snippets into one of the other languages. It is a really good entry point to play a little bit with the API and learn for example the specifics for your preferred programming language. If you are interested please take a look on the How to contribute description or contact the project owner Jürgen Schmidt

Linguistic review of the API reference

easy

The API is specified in UNOIDL, a Corba IDL like interface definition language, and based on this UNOIDL files we generate a html reference documentation. This documentation is mainly written by non native speakers and can be improved always. If you are interested in doing some linguistic review of this documentation or to improve the existing documentation please contact the project owner Jürgen Schmidt

API tutorials

easy

Take for example a SDK example and document it step by step or convert it from Java to C++. Create a new tutorial in the Wiki and help in this way to spread the knowledge. Creating a tutorial is a good way to get started for yourself and it helps other users to get started as well.
If you have a specific use-case and have already implemented a solution for it, you are also welcome to provide it as a tutorial especially when it shows the usage of a specific API or a general API concept (e.g. working with textfields, ...)

Dynamic UNOIDL Reference Browser

easy - experienced

required/useful skills: Java, UNO, XML and XSLT

We search for help to bring this GSOC project forward. The next steps are to build it as a component, improve the XSL transformation to be more javadoc compatible and to generate a javadoc like index .... The goal of this project is to provide a working reference browser in the internal StarBasic IDE. If you are interested in this interesting project please visit the project page of the Dynamic UNOIDL Reference Browser for more detailed info and feel free to contact Jürgen Schmidt for more information.

Enhance the uno-skeletonmaker

experienced

The uno-skeletonmaker is a useful tool to speed up the development of UNO components. Currently the tool can generate code for general UNO components as well as specific service provider interfaces (SPI) like calc add-ins or add-ons. The idea is to enhance the skeleton maker to support more SPI's and to make it more customizable. That means for example to allow prefixing of parameter names as well as internal member variables of generated classes. A further improvement can be the support of Python as a further programming language. Currently only Java and C++ are supported. For more detailed information feel free to contact Jürgen Schmidt.

Enhance NetBeans OpenOffice.org API plugin

advanced

The NetBeans OpenOffice.org API plugin is a useful tool to speed up the development of Java extensions for OpenOffice.org. But the design is not limited to Java only. The idea is to allow the selection of the programming language in the wizards and to generate the related Java or C++ project in the end. NetBeans offers already C++ support but to make use of it in the plugin it is necessary to do some research how a typical OpenOffice.org extension project can look like in NetBeans. The definition of C++ template projects is one part of this project. These templates will be later used in the plugin to generate new projects based on the collected information from the wizards. For more detailed information feel free to contact Jürgen Schmidt.

UNO awt graphical design editor in NetBeans

advanced

For powerful extensions it is often necessary to design own dialogs that fits perfect in the office environment. The internal Basic dialog editor from the office can be used for general use in the Java or C++ extensions as well but the whole design editor has limited capabilities. Currently there is some ongoing work to define a new xml based resource format that allows to define more layout constraints in the resources already. A good and working layout manager is missing for a long time and this ongoing work looks at least promising. The idea is to enhance the really easy to use graphical GUI editor from NetBeans and adapt it to allow the design of UNO awt dialogs. A new limited palette with UNO awt controls have to be designed. The next step is to provide a transformation from the NetBeans internal *.forms files into the office xml resource format and vice versa. It's just a first idea and many many things have to be researched and defined. If you are interested in this experienced project feel free to contact Jürgen Schmidt for more information.