Hollywood forums

Thanks for the replies.

Is it difficult (or impossible) to use Hollywood as a front-end for other programs, like Libre Office spreadsheet, where the input fields would be in the Hollywood application, and pressing an "export to Libre Office" button would copy all the input fields into a spreadsheet? I'm thinking that it would be useful for my partner, who is not good with computers, spreadsheets, or for that fact numbers (she is dyslexic), if I could create a program that draws a page for home budget input boxes, then automatically imports them into a Libre Office spreadsheet that I can create for myself, to keep our combined household budget numbers.

Does this sound like something a beginning Hollywood programmer could accomplish without too much trouble? It seems to me with my limited knowledge, that it should be very doable, if Hollywood can open a Libre Office document, and then import data into it, though getting the data into the correct fields of the Libre Office document will take some learning on my part. I could probably make the spreadsheet easy enough to read for her to input the numbers directly into Libre Office document, but her dyslexia is so severe that just looking at a spreadsheet full of numbers, would be difficult for her to manage. And creating a less confusing interface page for her to input her numbers into, might be a good exercise for me with Hollywood?

Edit: I probably should have started a separate thread for this question.

If I understood right, then yes, both doable and not necessarily even a bad exercise for a beginner.

Basically what I think would be that when you click myfile.libreexcel file, it would work so that before it actually opens the file, it would modify it.

Point is, as long as you know the format and how it works, for example .csv files that are sometimes used with spreadsheets are quite simple, you could first read that file into your Hollywood program, then it would make the necessary changes to that file, save it, and then finally open the file on libreoffice.

While this isn't technically a copy-paste, it would work same as copy-paste.

Idea is that CSV file could be something like:

firstname=empty, lastname=empty, age=empty

So now you would have info that you want to copy paste that is "Robert, Redford, 42"

So in practice you would first read this CSV file, and then you would in this case use replace string command or something to replace the empty ones with the new info, in the end resulting with a file:

firstname=Robert, lastname=Redford, age=42

And then you would open this new file in libre office, resulting in it opening a file that looks like it is a copy-paste, even it technically isnt.

In case like this, it would be very much doable, even for a beginner, and actually a good exercise since it would teach you right kind of thinking when you notice you need to take this and this situation in to account too.

amigadave wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 7:16 pm Does this sound like something a beginning Hollywood programmer could accomplish without too much trouble? It seems to me with my limited knowledge, that it should be very doable, if Hollywood can open a Libre Office document, and then import data into it, though getting the data into the correct fields of the Libre Office document will take some learning on my part.

Well yeah, I think you'll have to take the route to create or edit documents and then open them in Libre Office manually. Amiga programs usually would have an ARexx support that'd allow you send data directly to the program etc, but I don't think Libre Office has that userfriendly ways to achieve that.

Hollywood doesn't have direct support for document formats Libre Office uses, so you'll have to select some format it supports and edit it "manually" from your code... a plaintext based format would naturally be the easiest option. It also depends how complex documents you plan to use and should it work generally or just certain documents you know exactly. The default .ods format is actually a zip archive, which contains many data files, but you'll find there the correct one to edit, but you'll have to unzip and zip it again after modifications if you plan to use that format. In any case you'll have to learn the document structure... and if you have a template document which you just modify values, then it probably is a relatively easy task, but if you plan to add new cells and stuff to a more complex document, it might get more difficult.