[odf-devel] ODF tricks to interest first year students

[Matthew Cruickshank]

Lars D. Noodén wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering if anyone can recommend some simple ODF tricks or tools 
> to interest first years students in working with ODF.  A high buzzword 
> factor is helpful, maybe transforming ODF using XSLT into SQL INSERTS, 
> but not necessary.
>
> Some have a basic introduction to Java, others to C.

I think the nice thing is understanding how malleable ODF is so perhaps 
get them to rename it to .zip, pull out the content.xml and generally 
have a poke around. That it's not like binary formats and how 
transforming the content into other forms is much easier. Converting to 
a similarly flat structure like HTML or SQL INSERTS (as you say) would 
be a good exercise.

I don't know how long they have to play with this stuff, but for me the 
idea that this format was understandable was fantastic. Converting the 
format naturally followed this.

If they want a framework for this kind of stuff (and I don't know that 
they do... maybe it's better to pull apart the format and directly 
transform the files they extract) then there's my Docvert software. It's 
got a nice XML Pipeline for transforming Open Document into other 
formats. You could write a pipeline like,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pipeline>
    <stage process="Transform" 
withFile="odfs-content.xml-to-sql-insert.xsl"/>
    <stage process="Debug"/>
</pipeline>

And it'll show the results of that transform in the browser. Or you 
could write,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pipeline>
    <stage process="Transform" 
withFile="odfs-content.xml-to-sql-insert.xsl"/>
    <stage process="Transform" withFile="sql-insert-to-csv.xsl"/>
    <stage process="Debug"/>
</pipeline>

Which would use the results from the first <stage> as the input for the 
next <stage> so they could learn about building up XML chains.


.Matthew Cruickshank
http://holloway.co.nz/