Re: Saving/Loading SheetObjectBonobos

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 05:27:24PM +0200, Lutz Mueller wrote:
> I'd like my bonobo-objects to be saved. How should I implement that?
> Should I save the whole object in the file or just the name of the file
> on the disk? From reading the excel-plugin code, I understand that
> MS-Excel documents store the whole file (i.e. image) in the workbook. This
> makes sense as I probably want to be able to open the workbook on another
> computer. Should this be configurable?
XL supports both linking and embedding of objects.  However, their
binary stream format is more amenable to dumping in blocks of data.
They allow the status of the embedded object to be selected on
insertion.  Gnumeric's support of external links is too weak at this
point to make that feasible, so for now only pure embedded elements
make sense.
 
> If I store the whole data in the workbook, how should I do
> that? Using a CData section? An attribute (like in bonobo-io)? Escape it?
> Are there already functions available for that?

Michael prototyped this in bonobo-io as you noticed.  However, I
have not rushed to implement it within Gnumeric's primary xml format
in the hope that a more generic solution would be developed.  Mike
Kestner's recent work on compound document support sounds like what
we're looking for.  I'm hoping to read it shortly.  There have been
discussions on this but I have yet to see a definative solution.  In
broad strokes there is :
    - embed uuencoded blocks into the container's xml
    - embed containee's xml in container's xml
    - Use a structured storage stream (jar ? tar.gz ? efs ? ole ?)

The various schemes have their pro's and cons.  I'm betting that a
non-gnumeric specific decision is the way to go, but I have been to
busy/lazy to make an informed selection.