Re: paradox support: help needed

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 03:51:14PM +0200, Uwe Steinmann wrote:
> Ok, I guess I set up everything to start. I already created a new
> plugin directory 'paradox' and copied the files from xbase into it.
> Makefile.am, and plugin.xml.in is modified. 

sounds good.
 
> It looks like in the first step I must implement a function
> paradox_file_open (GnmFileOpener const *fo, IOContext *io_context,
>                  WorkbookView *wb_view, GsfInput *input)

yup. open and probe are the only entry points.

> xbase uses gsf to read the file. My library requires an open file
> pointer. First problem: how do get a file pointer from the GsfInput
> struct?

You can't.  You'll need to modify your library to either
1) Use gsf
2) Support some sort of i/o abstraction layer that you can use to
   wrap gsf.

There is no guarantee that the input will be coming from a file.  It
could be from a network, in memory, or even inside another file.

> PS: Do I have to develop the plugin within the gnumeric cvs tree? Or
>     is there a way to build it outside the tree?
for now that is your best bet.  During 1.3 we're aiming to support a
libgnumeric which would clarify things.