LibreOffice Macro Team: progress report

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice. In September 2019 we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support. The last progress report was published in April 2020, so it is high time to look into what has happened since then.

If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.

ScriptForge Libraries

The biggest single event was the introduction of ScriptForge Libraries in LibreOffice 7.1. ScriptForge and its documentation is a collaboration betwen Jean-Pierre Ledure, Alain Romedenne and Rafael Lima. You can read more about it in the January 2021 blog post and the work-in-progress Help content.

Wiki docs

Nathan Ullberg continued working on Impress macro articles.

Celia Palacios improved the Python guide and added new macro tutorials, such as populating spreadsheets with data from an SQL database.

Alain Romedenne continued adding syntax diagrams and improved and expanded the Python guide and macro articles.

Mauricio Baeza improved and expanded articles and added new ones, such as Insert a comment with custom presets, Copy content cell from Spreadsheet to other and Charts in Calc.

Steve Fanning added several new examples of Calc macros.

Code contributions from macro team members

Alain Romedenne:

• TypeName, VarType, TypeLen Basic QA test cases
• Unit test for Date() Basic function

Andreas Heinisch:

• MOD result is different for values passed as literals vs. using variables
• Fixed crash with replace function
• Unexpected result when executing ReDim statement on an array of structures
• Convert parameters to requested type so references are not lost
• Grant write access to the method used as a variable, so the name of the method can be used in all types of statements
• ReDim Preserve fails if array is filled by Split
• Fixed broken tests for cverr method
• With option base, arrays should start at index 1
• In order to prevent type conversion errors, reset a variable of type SbxERROR to not fixed
• Create variable with Variant/Type in StepLOADNC in order to prevent type conversion errors
• Support case-insensitive operation for non-ASCII characters in the Replace function
• Abort scan of a string beginning with a hashtag, if a comma is found
• VBA AutoFilter can’t compare strings
• Correct the behaviour of the Overwrite property
• Added possibility to sort macros via context menu
• ReDim Preserve fails if array is filled by Split

George Bateman:

• Kill copy+paste in VBA tests

Tomoyuki Kubota:

• More fixes to loading of basctl with –enable-mergelibs

Code contributions from honorary associate members

Compatibility fixes for Python 3.8 to 3.12 done by David Ostrovsky, Dante Doménech, Noel Grandin (Collabora) and Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat).

Anshu Khare:

• Return correct values for IsNumeric(“+2”) and CInt(“+2”)
• Show protection icon in front of sheet name when protected via Basic

Arnaud Versini:

• Many cleanups and optimisations in Basic handling code

Arpit Bandejiya:

• Accept CCur with negative strings

Caolán McNamara (Red Hat):

• Fix for PYTHONPATH-related crash
• Hide macro organize dialog before launching macro editing
• Fixed crash deleting module in macro editor

John Turpish:

• Don’t double-initialize a Global … As New …

Maxim Monastirsky:

• Rework last item handling in NewToolbarController

Michael Stahl (allotropia):

• Dropped Python 2 support everywhere
• pyuno: uno.Char is UTF-16 code unit, not UCS-4

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

• Use Unicode paths on Windows for pyuno
• Initialize method mapping table at compile time
• Unify tests
• Proper handling of For/For Each with On Error Resume Next
• Copy deep when there are multiple references to the old array
• Reimplement SbRtl_Replace to improve performance
• Fixed crash when inspecting an array after Redim Statement with option VBASupport 1
• Properly load arrays in user-defined types from image
• Use sheet-local named ranges for VBA’s Worksheet.Names
• Many cleanups and optimisations in Basic handling code

Noel Grandin (Collabora):

• pyuno: create instances with uno constructors
• Fixed shutdown crash in basic

Serge Krot (CIB):

• XDL import: missing empty combobox items

Shubham Jain:

• Wrote new tests for literals

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

• Use the new single-instance=”true” attribute in pyuno

Tushar Kumar Rai:

• Invoking a Basic routine with ByRef Variant parameter returns wrong value type
• Invoking a Basic routine with ByRef Long or Double parameter does not return modified value

Xisco Fauli (TDF):

• Add unit test for iteration
• Add UI test wrapper for macro editor

Help content

Improved by Alain Romedenne:

• InputBox Function
• MsgBox Statement
• The Gimmicks Library
• Document Event-Driven Macros
• The Euro Library
• The ScriptBindingLibrary Library
• Type Statement
• Dim Statement
• Call Statement
• Deprecated tags for ChDir, ChDrive, CurDir
• Completed syntax diagram work
• Improvements in Basic Subroutines help pages
• Improvements in the Basic table of contents
• Improvements in all articles dealing with Basic Date/Time methods
• Improvements in all articles dealing with color functions

Added by Alain Romedenne:

• The ImportWizard Library
• The WikiEditor Library
• Compiler Options, Runtime Conditions
• Resume Statement
• Err Object [VBA]

Improved by Rafael Lima:

• Fixed all Basic examples using the Open statement
• Mod Operator

Improved by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• All articles dealing with Basic string functions
• IIf Function
• Replace Function

Added by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• Calling Calc Functions