[pmwiki-devel] Idea: Recipe for using OpenOffice to edit tables in wiki page

[Ben Stallings]

Christian wrote,
> One of the things I find especially annoying to edit in a wiki page are 
> tables. So I've been thinking that it'd be a good idea to be able to edit 
> tables using either a separate tool or perhaps using forms.

This is as good a time as any to say that, frustrated by my seeming lack 
of progress with DataQuery, I'm splitting it into several smaller 
recipes.  One of these creates custom $Group.EditForms based on database 
tables.  I've been thinking of generalizing it (once I get it working 
for databases) so that it works with ZAP data pages as well... that is, 
if your data page looks like

(:firstname: John:)
(:lastname: Smith:)

The corresponding $Group.EditForm would have the fields

firstname: (:input text firstname:)
lastname: (:input text lastname:)

without you having to write the ZAP form to make it happen.

My point is that the same process could be generalized for tables.  If 
you edit a page that contains a table like

|| one || two ||
|| three ||||

you'd get a form that looks like

|| (:input text row1col1 one:) || (:input text row1col2 two:) ||
|| (:input text row2col1 three:) ||||

Just a thought... OpenOffice is certainly a more powerful editor, and if 
someone can figure out how to get a saved file to automatically upload 
to a wiki, it could well be a better solution.  --Ben S.