omer bar-or · The Plan Askew · More Progress and Directions for Testing

First, some more progress. I have created two more patches and committed all of them to the cws for the address book integration: macaddressbook01. The two new patches are for better commenting and localization support (links are to the accompanying issues in OOo). Please note that I had a lot of help from Patrick Luby on the localization patch. (See our conversation in the issue.)

With localization and commenting done, there is only one more task that I have set myself: moving the address book integration to the Cocoa API. (Of course, there is still testing to be done, and there are probably more bugs to fix.) Since the Cocoa version will likely not replace the Carbon version, at least not for some time, I will probably create a new cws for it that will exist parallel to macaddressbook01. More on this idea as it develops.

Also, now that I have committed several patches, Eric Bachard suggested that I offer directions for testing them. Here they are:

• <h2>To test the address book integration itself:</h2>
  1. In OOo, go to "File"->"Wizards"->"Address Data Source..."
  2. Select "Mac OS X address book" and click "Next."
  3. If you have groups in your address book, choose one as your main table in OOo. (The top option is for your entire address book.) Click "Next."
  4. If you want, rename your address book, and click "Finish."
  5. View your data sources (either press F4, click on the Data Sources button on your toolbar, or click on "View"->"Data Sources"
  6. You might need to expand the data source: expand "Addresses" (unless you named it something different) and then expand "Tables." Click on the table you want to see (e.g., "Address Book" for all records).
  7. You should now see your Mac OS X Address Book in OOo!
• <h2>Test multiple groups of the same name:</h2>
  1. In the Mac OS X Address Book: create two groups and give them the same name (I use "family").
  2. Go into OOo and view the Address Book data source.
  3. One of the groups should be named normally and one should have a " (2)" at the end, e.g., "family" and "family (2)."
  4. If you like, try various things (filtering, sorting, &c.) to each of these tables. They should never conflict with each other.
• <h2>Mail Merge Wizard:</h2>
  1. Open up the address book data source in OOo and click on the Mail Merge button (or go to "Tools"->"Mail Merge Wizard").
  2. Click "Next."
  3. Click "Next" again.
  4. If you opened the mail merge wizard via "Tools," you'll need to click on "Select Address List," choose "Addresses" (or whatever you named your data source) and then the table of your choosing.
  5. Click on "Match Fields."
  6. Match each field, at least until there are no more "not yet matched" lines in the preview. Note that the fields are largely in order and all of them appear (unless your addess book contains no addresses in it) -- this is what the patch fixes.
  7. Click "Next" until the wizard forces you to save, print, or send (step 8).
  8. Save, print, or send, as you like.
  9. Click "Finish."
• <h2>Localization:</h2>
  1. If the language on your Mac is not already something other than English: go into your System Preferences, to "Internationalization" and drag a language other than English to the top of your list. Close the system preferences.
  2. Go into the OpenOffice.org application folder (i.e., don't open the application, but view its contents).
  3. Go into "Contents."
  4. Go into "Resources."
  5. Create two folders, "en.lproj" and an lproj file for your main language. Mine was Spanish, so I created "es.lproj," and for French I would have created "fr.lproj," &c.
  6. Open OOo and view the Mac OS X Address Book data source. The labels should now be in the language of your chosen locale.

If you have any trouble, please let me know! Otherwise, I will soon start on the move to Cocoa. P.S., for those curious, here is the Address Book at work in Spanish: