Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 32171
Master documents cannot also be subdocuments (reliably)
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
At first I thought this worked: The first time I tried it, it let me include a master document as a subdocument in another, although I had to tell it it was an OOo text document. Next time the document was opened, the contained master document links were red and showed "File not found" in the containing master document's navigator. NB: Filename given when "File not found" error showing is definitely there: you can even load it up to edit it by double-clicking on it in the root master document's navigator. Either it should work (it so nearly does!) or it should recognise .sxg when attempting to add a subdocument and outright say it's unsupported. (After the initial success the first time I tried it, I went and restructured my entire document, and only encountered problems the next day when I re-ran the application, so this hurts more than it would have if I'd been told outright it wasn't supported behaviour.) Later testing shows that you can create a new master document ("submaster"), put a normal document in it, save it, create a second new master document ("supermaster"), put the "submaster" document in it, and it will work. You then save and close all documents and re-open "supermaster", and the included "submaster" document will be shown as "File not found". Subsequent attempts to re-insert that "submaster" document or any other master documents into that "supermaster" document fail (again, the link is inserted but shows as red and with a "File not found" error on the popup text. This seems to be repeatable. NB: First encountered this using OOo1.1.2 under Mac OS "Panther", but verified the same problem exists under Linux/PC Marked as "all" because I couldn't just mark *two*, either one or all. Probably exists everywhere but I can't test any more platforms.
reassigned to ES.
ES->BH: do we want to/can we support (check for effort and gain with the DEV) master docs in master docs?
I've been writing a very large document with files organized in directories, sub-directories, sub-sub-directories, etc. The files in these directories correspond to Front(Cover, Contents, etc.), Body(Parts, Chapters, Sections, etc.) and Back(Index, Bibliography, Appendices, etc.). The documents have many source data files in the sub-directories that are associated with them via hyper links. I just tried assembling the document using a hierarchy of master documents, and found that it doesn't work. It'd be much easier to build from the bottom up using a hierarchy of masterdocuments following the file structure. Assembling the documents with one master document will be a pain. I'll try assembling sub-documents using a master document and then saving those master documents as regular ODT files. Then I'll assemble them into higher-level master documents and save them as ODF files. And so on, until I've created the whole document. This is not very manageable because it involves a lot of manual work that might result in errors. However, it would easy with hierarchical master documents. So, I've voted that hierarchical master documents be supported.
The above export method failed, because export of ODM to ODT produces an uneditable file. See Issue 71707.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".