Calligra/Proposal for scripting in ODF

This page provides a proposal how to implement scripting in ODF.

Proposal

• So far the only way to get such dynamic functionality in is using macros. But macros suck, they are unflexible and functionality is missing.
• Since this days we have so many different Javascript-implementations around + they allow to sandbox (unlike python for exampl) + they are light and fast (unlike Java) and are already a de facto standard in HTML it would make sense to get Javascript into ODF as official "scripting-language".
• The Javascript is loaded from and saved to the ODF document zip-file as ScriptN/content.js and then referenced with a unique name in the document-content or other scripts.
• Ideally Calligra, LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are adopting the same solution and provide compatible Javascript-APIs.

Use-cases

• Allow to register Javascript for on-load, on-save and other events.
• Do something if e.g. an image is clicked.
• Formula variable for complex calculations.
• In forms e.g. for input-validation.

API

• Allow live-editing access (loading and manipulation) to the ODF DOM tree from with Javascript. That covers all kind of manipulation-scenarios and provides an (in the ODF specifications) already well documented API and proven API. So, very much what Javascript is able to do with HTML+Stylesheet in the Browser for a Office-suite.
• Helper-classes written in Javascript could provide a higher level API to deal with the ODF DOM tree.
• Add or remove files from the ODF zip document.
• Maybe allow access from within Javascript to the Calligra Tables formula logic. So Words and Stage could do complex calculations the OpenFormula-way in Javascript.
• Network-access to e.g. update content or fetch informations for processing from the internet. By it's nature this needs proper security (e.g. document signing).
• Persistent document and local document-wide storage to e.g. save and restore settings or 'global' variable-states.