openoffice: duplicating rows of a table in writer

Question

I need to programmatically duplicate rows of a Table in openoffice writer.

It's not difficult to add rows via table.Rows.insertByIndex(idx, count), that adds empty rows and it's easy to add text in that row assigning DataArray to the CellRange. Doing this way you loose control on the style of the cells and specifically if a cell has words with different style (bold/italic) they get flattened to the same face. What I need is to duplicate a row in a way that preserves the style of each word in the cell/row.

This is the last step of a Python template system that uses openoffice (http://oootemplate.argolinux.org). I access the document via uno interface in Python but any language would do to explain the logic behind it.

Answer 1

The solution is to use controller's method .getTrasferable() to get data from the ViewCursor. that in turn requires that you control your view cursor and position it in every single cell (I was not able to make the ViewCursor span multiple cells). Once you have acquired the transferable you place the cursor in the destination and insert.

  desktop = context.ServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext("com.sun.star.frame.Desktop", context)
  document = desktop.loadComponentFromURL("file://%s/template-debug.odt" % os.getcwd() ,"_blank", 0, ())
  controller=document.getCurrentController()
  table = document.TextTables.getByIndex(0)
  view_cursor=controller.getViewCursor()


  src = table.getCellByName(src_name)
  dst = table.getCellByName(dst_name)

  view_cursor.gotoRange(src.Text, False)
  txt = controller.getTransferable()
  view_cursor.gotoRange(dst.Text, False)

  controller.insertTransferable(txt)