Collabora Office development code repository
- 580b437 use more concrete SwXText class · 8 weeks ago main
- e2874ce use more concrete UNO · 8 weeks ago
- b22061a make more use of DynCastSwVirtFlyDrawObj · 9 weeks ago
- 6f1c1af fix --disable-pdfimport build · 8 weeks ago
- 65f7917 no need to use SAL_WHERE when throwing exception · 9 weeks ago
Collabora Office
Collabora Office is an integrated office suite based on copyleft licenses and compatible with most document formats and standards. Collabora Office is backed by a large community of enterprises, developers and other volunteers dedicated to creating a fun place to develop a great FLOSS Office Productivity suite.
A quick overview of the Collabora Office code structure.
Overview
You can develop for Collabora Office in one of two ways, one recommended and one much less so. First the somewhat less recommended way: it is possible to use the SDK to develop an extension, for which you can read the API docs and Developers Guide. This re-uses the (extremely generic) UNO APIs that are also used by macro scripting in StarBasic.
The best way to add a generally useful feature to Collabora Office is to work on the code base however. Overall this way makes it easier to compile and build your code, it avoids any arbitrary limitations of our scripting APIs, and in general is far more simple and intuitive - if you are a reasonably able C++ programmer.
The Build Chain and Runtime Baselines
These are the current minimal operating system and compiler versions to run and compile Collabora Office, also used by the TDF builds:
- Windows:
- Runtime: Windows 10
- Build: wsl-as-helper + Visual Studio 2022
- macOS:
- Runtime: 11
- Build: 13 or later + Xcode 14.3 or later (using latest version available for a given version of macOS)
- Linux:
- Runtime: RHEL 9 or CentOS 9 and comparable
- Build: either GCC 12; or Clang 18 with libstdc++ 11
- iOS (only for Collabora OfficeKit):
- Runtime: 14.5 (only support for newer i devices == 64 bit)
- Build: Xcode 12.5 and iPhone SDK 14.5
- Android:
- Build: NDK 27 and SDK 30.0.3
- Emscripten / WASM:
- Runtime: a browser with SharedMemory support (threads + atomics)
- Build: Qt 5.15 with Qt supported Emscripten 1.39.8
- See README.wasm
Java is required for building many parts of Collabora Office. In TDF Wiki article Development/Java, the exact modules that depend on Java are listed.
The baseline for Java is Java Development Kit (JDK) Version 17 or later.
The baseline for Python is version 3.11. It follows the version available in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and the Maintenance Support version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If you want to use Clang with the Collabora Office compiler plugins, the minimal version of Clang is 18. Since Xcode doesn't provide the compiler plugin headers, you have to compile your own Clang to use them on macOS.
You can find the TDF configure switches in the distro-configs/ directory.
To setup your initial build environment on Windows and macOS, we provide the Collabora Office Development Environment (LODE) scripts.
For more information see the build instructions for your platform in the TDF wiki.
The Important Bits of Code
Each module should have a README.md file inside it which has some degree of documentation for that module; patches are most welcome to improve those. We have those turned into a web page here:
However, there are two hundred modules, many of them of only peripheral interest for a specialist audience. So - where is the good stuff, the code that is most useful. Here is a quick overview of the most important ones:
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| sal/ | this provides a simple System Abstraction Layer |
| tools/ | this provides basic internal types: Rectangle, Color etc. |
| vcl/ | this is the widget toolkit library and one rendering abstraction |
| framework/ | UNO framework, responsible for building toolbars, menus, status bars, and the chrome around the document using widgets from VCL, and XML descriptions from /uiconfig/ files |
| sfx2/ | legacy core framework used by Writer/Calc/Draw: document model / load/save / signals for actions etc. |
| svx/ | drawing model related helper code, including much of Draw/Impress |
Then applications
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| desktop/ | this is where the main() for the application lives, init / bootstrap. the name dates back to an ancient StarOffice that also drew a desktop |
| sw/ | Writer |
| sc/ | Calc |
| sd/ | Draw / Impress |
There are several other libraries that are helpful from a graphical perspective:
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| basegfx/ | algorithms and data-types for graphics as used in the canvas |
| canvas/ | new (UNO) canvas rendering model with various backends |
| cppcanvas/ | C++ helper classes for using the UNO canvas |
| drawinglayer/ | View code to render drawable objects and break them down into primitives we can render more easily. |
Rules for #include Directives (C/C++)
Use the "..." form if and only if the included file is found next to the including file. Otherwise, use the <...> form. (For further details, see the mail Re: C[++]: Normalizing include syntax ("" vs <>).)
The UNO API include files should consistently use double quotes, for the benefit of external users of this API.
loplugin:includeform (compilerplugins/clang/includeform.cxx) enforces these rules.
Finding Out More
Beyond this, you can read the README.md files, send us patches, talk to us https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/ and/or grab people on Matrix #cool-dev:matrix.org we're a friendly and generally helpful mob. We know the code can be hard to get into at first, and so there are no silly questions.
SAST Tools
PVS-Studio - static analyzer for C, C++, C#, and Java code.