Win32::Word::Declarative published

And thus the first publication of a Class::Declarative-based module. And oh, how many things could still be done on it...

Further necessaries for Win32::Word::Declarative

So I did the standalone use-WWD thing and I'm polishing up an initial tutorial for the module prior to releasing 0.01 onto CPAN, and there are two things, at this point, that make the module less than perfectly usable in its current form. (This ignores the fact that it covers about 2.7% of Word's functionality; that's just incremental stuff that can be filled in at my leisure.)

First, it's hard to use it from plain Perl. I have a good plan for this: instead of indented strings, accept an arrayref format based more or less on the output from the indentation parser. This allows us to generate nodal structure really easily without worrying about having to format it with indented text.

But the worse thing is that the C::Decl framework still basically supports mere declaration. That is, I can't really specify a mutable data structure that is based on instance data. And that's a severe limitation - which is mildly surprising. A Wx user interface doesn't really need a lot of runtime mutability, but a Word document is an output format. Its natural functionality is to present runtime data, making the lack more glaring.

So really, a high priority for C::Decl has to be mutable structure. Macros. Templates. Whatever the mechanism or mechanisms are called, the use case is this: a script that (1) gathers some information somewhere, then (2) generates a Word document based on that information. We can't really do that right now without dropping into Perl or using Perl to generate the Word-generation script and then running it separately, and that just isn't where I want to be.

Also, a small tweak: right now, C::Decl only gives runtime love to the topmost semantic domain. Instead, I'm pretty sure that it should just scan its children in order and attempt to execute each one. There could be a [norun] option to suppress this explicitly, if necessary. And of course in the case of Wx, execution just won't return after you hit the base frame/dialog - but we don't really care much about that.

But this is necessary in order to gather information in the use case above - and in general, it will be a normal state of affairs to set things up, then instantiate something. The alternative is to allow the macro itself to run code at build time, and that's OK, but in terms of presentation it will often be clearer to do things in two phases that are visually distinct.

Win32::Word::Declarative

So for some time I've needed a way to slap together scripts for Word that don't rely on Word's own scripting. I used to do this stuff in Python, but now I've gotten Win32::Word::Declarative to the point where it can generate an attractive document as, say, an invoice.

This is an important milestone, but it doesn't get me all the way to an actual invoicing system. I need to have a few more components first:

• Something like Document::Declarative to manage the actual files, repositories, and templates - I go back and forth as to whether that should be inherent in the language or split out into a document-management semantics
• Mapping to apply templates and create abstract documents and expressed document
• Database retrieval to obtain customer information and so on, not to mention to determine what goes into invoicing in the first place
• The hierarchical configuration system (this would apply to templates)
• Probably something like a general semantics system; this is kind of intuitive, but I get the feeling that this is how you'll be able to say "I want an invoice and this is what an invoice is".

So. Getting there, but not yet there. A whole lot closer than last week, though. I think there may be enough working in Win32::Word::Declarative that I can put v0.01 on CPAN.