Hi all, I'm writing a report script that inserts collected data into various parts of an ODT document. I started off using getUserFieldElement() as the position token, but discovered that they are only useful for simple text replacement (which is useful, but just not the complete solution for me).

Another thing I'm using at the moment is selectElementByBookmark(), which I'm using to insert paragraphs and tables, but unlike user fields there is no visual representation of the bookmark in OpenOffice.

My question is really just a "how would you do it" type question. I'd like to have a situation where the admins who write the report analysis can easily add, remove, or move named tokens in the document that my script can then find and manipulate. Is there any kind of element that is (a)easy for a non-technical person to understand, (b)easy to find one or more occurences (using OODoc), and (c)works well with paragraphs, tables, graphics and other elements.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Regards, Paul

Thanks for your suggestions. They would of course work fine, but I'm sure there's a better way. Could we not modify getUserFieldElement to also provide an element or path that works with insertParagraph, insertTable, removeParagraph, etc? Alternately, could it not return an array of paths for each occurrence of the user field value?

With user fields it would be easy for our staff to write document templates without having to learn what is in essence another markup language added on top of what is probably a perfectly adequate feature set built into OpenOffice.org.

Cheers, Paul