Re: [office-comment] covered-table-cell

[Jos van den Oever <jos.van.den.oever@kogmbh.com>]

On 12/17/2014 04:44 AM, Zorg wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm writing a Qt library for .ods files, available at:
> https://github.com/f35f22fan/QOds
>
> Can you please explain why one needs a special type
> of cell (covered-table-cell) to designate the cells that
> are next to the spanned ones?
>
> I mean programmatically it's easy/possible to figure it out which
> cells are covered, hence apparently the office suit shouldn't need a
> hint for this.

It is indeed possible to calculate the positions of cells by evaluating 
all the table:number-columns-spanned and table:number-rows-spanned 
attributes. Infering the empty positions is quite cheap to do for the 
table:number-columns-spanned attribute, but requires iterating through 
previous rows for the table:number-rows-spanned attribute.

You can reduce the number of required table:covered-table-cell elements 
by using them like this:

 <t:table-row>
   <t:table-cell t:number-rows-spanned="3" t:number-columns-spanned="2"/>
   <t:covered-table-cell t:number-columns-repeated="2"/>
 </t:table-row>
 <t:table-row>
   <t:table-cell t:number-rows-spanned="3"/>
   <t:covered-table-cell t:number-columns-repeated="2"/>
 </t:table-row>

The explanation in version 1.0 of the specification adds:
  "The <table:covered-table-cell> is especially used by spreadsheet
   applications, where it is a common use case that a covered cell
   contains content."

Here is a real world example for row 1 and 2 in a spreadsheet:

  <table:table-row>
    <table:table-cell table:formula="of:=[.B1]"
       table:number-columns-spanned="3" table:number-rows-spanned="2"/>
   <table:covered-table-cell office:value-type="string">
     <text:p>hello</text:p>
   </table:covered-table-cell>
   <table:covered-table-cell/>
  </table:table-row>
  <table:table-row>
    <table:covered-table-cell table:number-columns-repeated="3"/>
  </table:table-row>

As you can see, the word 'hello' from hidden cell b1 is also shown in 
cell A1.

Cheers,
Jos