Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 77118
crash opening Ww8 doc having OLE in headless/UNO, win2K/win2003 but not XP
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:15:20 UTC
I use OO2 in headless mode under Windows to convert batches of MS-Office documents, using the JODConverter software (http://www.artofsolving.com/opensource/jodconverter). It works generally great, and I have converted hundreds of documents. Some MS-Word documents however cause Writer to crash, both with OO2.1 and OO2.2. Since OO2 runs in headless mode, I do not see any error message, just the error message from JODConverter telling me it lost the connection with OO2 headless. One characteristic of these documents seems to be that they contain a table, and in the table a cell which contain a graphic (the logo of a company). The crash occurs on 2 machines (one is Win2K, the other Win2003), but not on others (all these are WinXP SP2), and only when working in "headless" mode (background, as server on port 8100). Opening the same document with the normal GUI works fine. If I remove the graphic in the table cell, OO2 Writer does not crash anymore on the document in headless mode. I could provide a test document, if I can find out how to attach a file here.
Created attachment 44943 [details] removing logo stops crash
Created attachment 44944 [details] error log, xml
With no intention of confusing the issue, I would nevertheless like to add : Browsing the Writer and API forums, I have seen a number of times mentioned that OO2 "disconnected unexpectedly" from the driving application while attempting a document conversion. I have processed hundreds of documents with the same method, succesfully. But when it crashes, that is the symptom. What I mean is that a number of these other reports could be linked to the same issue. Possibly.
MRU->MAV: seems to be a problem of the OLE object (not a graphic, it is an MS Draw object) in the doc. The report has been sent by submitter "soliplaya" - in the report database it could be found under stack ID 982971. I have set the target to 2.3 at first, but if there won't be enough resources we could change it to a succeeding release.
I am not competent to guess what the issue might be, but the fact that the same documents open correctly in the normal GUI mode on the same platforms, but crash OO 2.1 and 2.2 in headless mode, can that indicate a problem of the OLE object per se ? (I mean, the documents and embedded objects remain the same). Maybe there is something different happening in headless mode versus GUI, that triggers a crash under Win2K and Win2003, but not XP ? (From the developer of JODConverter, I also know that under Linux the problem doesn't occur).
Yes the problem is triggered by the embedded objects. The problem here is that on Windows platform the Windows OLE object is switched to running state, that seems to let the functionality in ole32.dll to crash in case of headless office. This bug will not be fixed for 2.3 release, changing the target.
Any idea why ole32 crashes when OOo runs in "headless" mode that IIRC is nothing else than a VCL feature?
headless mode is not really a vcl feature on windows; on the X11platforms we have a different plugin then to render offscreen and not use the X11 server, but that does of course not apply on Windows. To my knowledge vcl does not do anything special on Windows if "-headless" is on the command line. All that happens is AFAIK handled in framework and I think the only major difference is that the documents are not shown then ?
target 3.x
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".