Word OpenDoPE plug-in wishlist

[tinne]

These are the things I miss most about the otherwise very usable OpenDoPE Word plug-in (tested on Win XP 32 Bit, Office 2010), in my personal order of decreasing importance.

• The listboxes in the OpenDoPE task pane should scale according to pane size, and/or should be resizable inside the pane.
• Make contents repeat should allow to select an existing xpath expression, like with Make conditional.
• The xpath helper should allow to consolidate duplicate entries into one.
• The dataBinding/@prefixMappings attribute for the xsi namespace should be always added to make all xpath expressions available for all kinds of usages directly after creation.
• When adding a repeat/conditional around a binding, after adding the binding the cursor is inside the innermost SDT starting at the place, not at the beginning of the new SDT, where it should be.
• It should be possible to add a repeat/conditional to a table column. This can be implemented by adding an SDT to each column cell. Ideally, the plug-in would handle this transparently to the user.
• The table layout buttons select/current cell/row/column/table should be duplicated in the OpenDoPE pane.
• It should be possible to manually open the OpenDoPE task pane, as automatic recognition does not always work. Workaround: "Add CustomXML/No/Ok"
• It should be possible to set the data type of a binding SDT to plain text/date/image/list box/combo box.

[tinne]

There was another item I had come across, which I considered to be ranked quite high:

When you mark several horizontally subsequent cells in a column, the plug-in does not allow to wrap the whole of them in an SDT, although this is technically possible and may perfectly make sense. The issue interestingly does not exist with more than one table subsequent rows, which can always be wrapped in an SDT.

Testing with manually created sections wrapped this way it appeared that Office 2010 has major problems with this kind of sdtContent. Thus, it does not seem to be possible to have a table horizontal SDT with <sdtContent><td .../><td .../></sdtContent>, though I got no idea why. Anybody got an idea?

[jason]

Thanks for posting these Tinne; you'll be able to action some of them yourself if you wish as soon as I find time to publish the plugin source code. cheers .. Jason

[tinne]

I was hoping you had the chance to fix the minor effort issues and judge the others whether they seem feasible to you as well.

I am no expert in the office SDKs, let alone c#, but hopefully someone does when you kindly publish it. And I could always take a look.

[tinne]

And here goes the most annoying one:

• From time to time, something replaces all entries od:xpath=someMeaningfulDescriptor with od:xpath=xXX, where XX is some running number. Since od:condition and od:repeat are not affected and the <w:dataBinding/> element keeps unchanged, I rather suspect the Word plug-in does this weird thing. The someMeaningfulDescriptor is complemented with the xXX xpath element in the ('http://opendope.org/xpaths','xpaths') custom xml document part, and you cannot maintain the xpath expressions in one point any more.
  
  Why would someone do this? Repairing this manually for 120+ bindings is really annoying.

[jason]

Tinne, when you have some time, would you mind putting these individually into the issue tracker at http://opendope.codeplex.com/ and I will start by looking at the "most annoying one". thanks .. Jason

[tinne]

Now the vacation is over, I have all items add added to the tracker. Please ask individually where my complains where to stenographic.