[00:00.000 --> 00:13.440]  So this talk will be a follow-up to the one I did at the LibreFist conference last year
[00:13.440 --> 00:21.360]  in September that was about content controls in write or in general and some of the follow-up
[00:21.360 --> 00:28.720]  work was expected, some of that was more like a surprise, so a couple of incremental improvements
[00:28.720 --> 00:39.120]  appeared in the past half year, so it seemed like a good idea to overview where we are compared to
[00:41.040 --> 00:48.160]  where we were in September. So for those who don't know me, I'm Mikhail Shvindam
[00:48.160 --> 00:55.200]  and from Hungary, I used to be very much involved in the write or RTF import export
[00:55.200 --> 01:02.000]  so much these days, but I still focus on write or work for Culebra and
[01:04.160 --> 01:11.440]  for content controls for the scope of this talk, we talk about these rich tax content controls,
[01:12.160 --> 01:20.080]  it's like it's for for Finland, we used to have these input fields in write or already
[01:20.080 --> 01:27.840]  where you can provide some placeholder tax and you can mark that this is the place of the document
[01:27.840 --> 01:33.440]  where you can type when you fill in some form, but one big limitation of that was that it was
[01:33.440 --> 01:39.680]  built on fields and fields can't have formatting, so it was really just for plain text and where
[01:39.680 --> 01:45.920]  write or really shine says more like there can be a rich text, so we want something that provides
[01:45.920 --> 01:54.960]  rich text, so that's where you can have rich text content controls. The UX mass specification
[01:54.960 --> 02:01.520]  calls these structured documents tags, but it's really the same thing, they are user interface
[02:01.520 --> 02:10.720]  calls these content controls, so we also call them content controls, and the way it's structured
[02:10.720 --> 02:17.600]  is that you can once you have a paragraph text, then you can have multiple text portions inside
[02:17.600 --> 02:24.480]  that, so let's say you have some text, normal text, then some bold text, and then again normal text,
[02:24.480 --> 02:30.480]  then we split up the text, paragraph text to three portions, the normal one, the bold one, and again
[02:30.480 --> 02:39.040]  the normal one, and for fields the restriction was that you can't have multiple of these text
[02:39.040 --> 02:45.760]  portions inside that's to be filled in, and content controls support this, so you can have
[02:45.760 --> 02:52.240]  multiple portions, although they are limited to a single paragraph, at least this inline
[02:52.240 --> 02:58.880]  content controls that I'm talking about, so you can't have a content control starting at some
[02:58.880 --> 03:04.720]  random point in the document and ending at some random point, perhaps you know that you can do
[03:04.720 --> 03:11.280]  that with bookmarks, it might start inside the table and outside the table, and fieldmarks can
[03:11.280 --> 03:18.240]  provide the same thing, content controls are intentionally limited to be inside a single
[03:18.240 --> 03:25.200]  paragraph, so we enforce that when you create them, we enforce this when you edit them, we
[03:25.200 --> 03:33.600]  enforce this during exporting to DocEx and ODT, so this is something, this is an invariant
[03:33.600 --> 03:40.480]  that we want to maintain, another complexity is that it's possible to do nesting for this,
[03:41.600 --> 03:48.320]  so when you look at how we write this in XML, then XML elements naturally support nesting,
[03:48.320 --> 03:55.840]  and we call this well-formed nesting, so the outdoor content control starts, and then the
[03:55.840 --> 04:01.600]  inner one starts, and then it's a requirement that the inner one will finish, and then the
[04:01.600 --> 04:09.040]  outer one will finish, and so you can do nesting, but you can do these start ones start to finish
[04:09.040 --> 04:13.920]  them the first and finish the last, similar to what you know from HTML for example,
[04:15.520 --> 04:20.400]  so we want to support this setup that you can do nesting but not in a random order,
[04:21.120 --> 04:27.760]  and you can include multiple text portions but not random positions with start and then
[04:27.760 --> 04:37.680]  bottom constraint that they are in a single program, and if you have fields, then fields
[04:37.680 --> 04:42.240]  typically have some kind of instruction text like commands, and there is the field result,
[04:42.800 --> 04:48.960]  content controls are more like annotations and a piece of text, so you have some start and
[04:48.960 --> 04:55.120]  then you can have a bunch of properties on top of that, we will see you can give it a title,
[04:55.120 --> 05:02.080]  you can give it an alias, you can define the type and so on, so the rich text is the simplest type
[05:02.080 --> 05:09.760]  where you just say that you can fill in something here, and if the task is like provide your one
[05:09.760 --> 05:16.160]  line or command from this for them presentation, then and you say it was really bad, like really,
[05:16.160 --> 05:23.040]  really, so you select the really and market board because it was really that bad, but you can do
[05:23.040 --> 05:30.400]  multi-programs, you can't write a novel on how bad that was, so that was a rich text, and
[05:35.440 --> 05:43.040]  so somehow the picture is missing the top pixels, so you missed the whole point,
[05:44.960 --> 05:51.920]  but I will explain what you should see there, so it's called, I think the values in the interface
[05:51.920 --> 05:57.520]  cause this title, but in the markup we call this alias, but it's the same thing, the point is that
[05:57.520 --> 06:03.680]  you have some complex form and you are supposed to fill in the date, the date and the date and
[06:03.680 --> 06:08.400]  finally the date, and of course they mean that, that means you are registering your company and
[06:08.400 --> 06:14.480]  there was a date when you created the company, there was a date when you filed the papers for it,
[06:14.480 --> 06:20.960]  and there was the date when the first employee was hired and so on, but it's just the date, so
[06:20.960 --> 06:26.400]  it's very confusing to fill that in, and what content controls can provide is that when you
[06:26.400 --> 06:33.520]  enter that content control, then there is a small pop-up similar to when you edit headers and you
[06:33.520 --> 06:38.560]  get the name of the page style and so on, so you get some tooltap explaining what exactly you are
[06:38.560 --> 06:45.680]  filling in, that might be helpful, so let's say the text would normally just say that you need to
[06:45.680 --> 06:53.280]  enter information about the, let's say the birth data, but that means that they want the birth
[06:53.280 --> 06:58.800]  location and the birth date and then when you enter the content control they can give you this hand
[06:58.800 --> 07:07.840]  so that it's a bit easier, so the output, the field inform might conform to what was expected,
[07:07.840 --> 07:14.400]  how some regulation is to accept, but when you try to enter it as a more mortal, you are actually
[07:14.400 --> 07:20.800]  able to fill it in because you don't need to like look up some 10 pages of documentation,
[07:20.800 --> 07:26.800]  how to fill in that form, you go to the form and you get enough helpful context information so that
[07:26.800 --> 07:33.840]  you can just do that, so these aliases and tags were initially missing on the right-hand side,
[07:33.840 --> 07:43.120]  and now we support it, then one other problem was that, I mentioned you can have multiple
[07:43.120 --> 07:50.960]  text portions inside the single content control, so what you see on the above screenshot is that
[07:50.960 --> 07:56.400]  we have an x corrector, then a new line break, so we kind of hack it around, technically it's
[07:56.400 --> 08:01.920]  still a program, a single program, but you see it's on multiple lines, and then we even define
[08:01.920 --> 08:08.000]  some tab stop and then a tab portion, so technically it's still a single program, but you see that
[08:08.000 --> 08:16.880]  this is like at least three different text portions, and we used to take each and every text portion
[08:16.880 --> 08:22.560]  and then it's PDF widgets for that, so in this case when you exported this to PDF and you wanted
[08:22.560 --> 08:27.200]  to fill in the PDF form, then you got three different widgets, which is a nonsense, this
[08:27.200 --> 08:34.880]  was not the intention, so in case originally the placeholder text would be multiple portions there,
[08:34.880 --> 08:40.880]  your right turn, and we still take the bounding rectangle of the content control and just
[08:40.880 --> 08:52.400]  emit a single widget, as probably the user would expect that, then another thing is the primary
[08:52.400 --> 08:59.840]  use case we had in mind was that you create some editable writer document, and at the very end
[08:59.840 --> 09:05.600]  you export that to PDF, and the actual form filling will probably happen in some PDF reader,
[09:05.600 --> 09:13.040]  but you might also have some slightly different workflow where you mark most of the document
[09:13.040 --> 09:20.240]  as read only, and then you can have the editable document handed out to users, and they actually
[09:20.240 --> 09:25.440]  fill in the form in writer, now the trouble is that in case we made the document read only,
[09:25.440 --> 09:31.360]  then you can't fill in the form because you change this content control, and they are part
[09:31.360 --> 09:35.360]  of the document, and the whole document is read only, so that content control is also read only,
[09:36.080 --> 09:42.000]  now this was working with input files before, they had various problems, but this bit was working,
[09:42.000 --> 09:47.200]  they knew that they are an exception from this general read only thing, so it was possible to
[09:47.200 --> 09:56.640]  fill in input files, now we do the same, and we can have this setup that the whole document is
[09:56.640 --> 10:07.360]  read only, but the content control can be still added in. Another thing was that if you look at
[10:07.360 --> 10:14.720]  what Word provides for VBA, if you want to manipulate these content controls, then they have
[10:14.720 --> 10:21.040]  an understanding of what is the list of content controls in the document, this can be very handy
[10:21.040 --> 10:29.200]  in case you want to have some macro that automatically processes the already filled
[10:29.200 --> 10:34.880]  in document, now there are other ways to do that, but one way is that you write some macro that will
[10:34.880 --> 10:40.800]  extract all the fielding results from the document, and for that they can just go to the first content
[10:40.800 --> 10:46.000]  control, the second one query how many content controls you have in the document, but on the
[10:46.000 --> 10:50.240]  right side this is really just a formatting on a program, so you would have to scan the entire
[10:50.240 --> 10:56.080]  document to find out if you have any content controls at all, so we don't have this random
[10:56.080 --> 11:03.120]  access to content controls, until we did not, so initially we ignored this VBA problem,
[11:03.840 --> 11:09.040]  but when Justin was trying to build a VBA compact layer on top of content controls,
[11:09.040 --> 11:13.600]  then he found that there is no random access to content controls, so you can't do this
[11:14.400 --> 11:18.960]  without scanning the whole document, which can be very slow, so this is not great,
[11:20.240 --> 11:25.440]  and we discovered that actually footnotes already provide this, that's also kind of
[11:25.440 --> 11:31.680]  formatting on some piece of paragraph text, and that has this manager that will track as footnotes
[11:31.680 --> 11:37.200]  are created and deleted, and then you can quickly get a list of all the footnotes in the document,
[11:37.200 --> 11:44.560]  so why can't we do the same for content controls, and yeah you can do that, so now there is some
[11:44.560 --> 11:53.200]  star basic access, or actually UNO API access, and that's visible with me in basic, and also
[11:53.200 --> 11:59.600]  there is a VBA compact layer on top of that, where you can query how many content controls you have,
[11:59.600 --> 12:08.000]  you can, if you fill in these alias things, then you can even say that I want to jump to the birth
[12:08.000 --> 12:13.360]  date content control, without saying that is the third one, so if you insert something in between,
[12:13.360 --> 12:19.760]  then it won't break, so this manager provides that, what's necessary here,
[12:21.440 --> 12:27.680]  another thing was that initially when I was adding drop downs, I wanted to like incrementally extend
[12:27.680 --> 12:34.000]  what's available in rich text content controls, so the idea was that in case there are list items
[12:34.000 --> 12:39.280]  for this content control, you know that's then probably a drop down, but there is complexity
[12:39.280 --> 12:48.320]  there, you can have drop downs, okay, you can have drop downs, and you can have combo boxes,
[12:48.320 --> 12:55.520]  and it's possible that, and you can't say which one it is, if it has list items, it might be
[12:55.520 --> 13:02.000]  any of that, and also it turns out it's valid to have a drop down with no items, so that's what
[13:02.000 --> 13:07.680]  you see there, knows that's working, we explicitly track if that's a combo box or a drop down, and
[13:07.680 --> 13:15.120]  then you can have both types, we enforce that if it's possible to just choose one item from a
[13:15.120 --> 13:21.040]  complete list, or you can also have free form tags there, and also in case some existing
[13:21.040 --> 13:26.320]  document for whatever reason has no list items, then we don't break that, and we don't implicitly
[13:26.320 --> 13:32.800]  turn that to a rich text content control just because it has no list items. I think this is
[13:32.800 --> 13:39.440]  the last one, I say Hossain was doing lots of testing on content controls, and of course the
[13:39.440 --> 13:47.520]  first thing he was trying is some Parisian text, and of course it was breaking, I think it had
[13:47.520 --> 13:54.800]  three pieces, so one was the positioning, if you have the drop down arrow on the left-hand side now
[13:54.800 --> 14:00.800]  for archaeal text, that means that if you take the position of the whole bounding rectangle,
[14:00.800 --> 14:06.400]  then you need to shift that to the left to have the correct position, so fixing up the position
[14:06.400 --> 14:14.400]  based on the direction of the text frame, so the paragraph is what's one saying, then also what you
[14:14.400 --> 14:22.480]  were in the render inside the bounding rectangle for the arrow button and for that frame that
[14:22.480 --> 14:28.480]  needed fixing, and the last thing is that if you see a button, then you might have the silly idea
[14:28.480 --> 14:33.360]  to click on that button, and you expect that something happens, but we need to do this hit
[14:33.360 --> 14:41.280]  testing to show, to decide if you clicked on the button or not, and if you do that, then we need
[14:41.280 --> 14:48.160]  to handle this correctly for RTL versus RTL, so that's no all working, so this is it, there was
[14:48.160 --> 14:54.640]  some polish since the LibreFist conference is still, what the feature set it provides is still
[14:54.640 --> 15:01.520]  something that meant to be one-to-one possible to map to the word feature set, we tried to
[15:02.640 --> 15:08.400]  fully save this to UDF without any loss, you can export that to PDF, there are these various types,
[15:08.400 --> 15:15.120]  you can see a few types there, and basically more properties are added, some small editing
[15:15.120 --> 15:39.120]  improvements, and it's a little bit easier to script that now, so that's what we have, thanks for listening.