The development environment

The very first step is to install the needed tools to work. The OpenOffice.org Eclipse integration development needs:

Installing the tools

The only important thin to recall is to be sure that the OpenOffice.org SDK will path will not contain any white space on the windows platform. For more details on the different tools installations, please refer to their official documentation.

After having installed Eclipse and OpenOffice.org, make sure to define the OOo Classes user library in the Eclipse installation. For this, simply select the Window > Preferences menu in Eclipse and open the Java > Build path > User Library configuration page. Then add a new library named OOo Classes including the following jars in the OpenOffice.org installation. This is necessary in order to correctly build the sources.

If several JDKs are installed on the computer, please make sure that the 1.5 one is used for the OpenOffice.org Eclipse integration projects.

Get the sources

The next step is to get the plugins sources as Eclipse projects. First check the sources from the OpenOffice.org CVS, module api/ooeclipseintegration. For more informations on how to check out sources from OpenOffice.org CVS, please refer to this page. Be sure to prune the empty directories to have only the needed ones: the others comes from an old project organization.

The second step is to import the sources as Eclipse projects. For this open the File > Import menu and choose General > Existing projects into workspace. Then choose the directory where the sources have been extracted. Three projects should appear in the list as shown by the next illustration. Select them all and click on Finish: the projects are imported in the workspace.