Configuration

When using DefaultOfficeManagerConfiguration, there are a number of settings that can be configured. Some of the default settings used by JODConverter have been chosen because they have a greater chance of working out of the box, but they are not necessarily the optimal ones.

Template Profile Dir

The OfficeManager creates a temporary profile dir for its OOo process, to avoid interfering with e.g. another OOo instance being used by the user.

By default this temporary profile will be a new one created by OOo with its own defaults settings, and relies on the -nofirststartwizard command line option.

You may want to provide a templateProfileDir containing customised settings instead. The OfficeManager will copy such template dir to the temporary profile, so OOo will use the same settings while still keeping the OOo instances separate.

The profile can be customised in OOo by selecting the Tools > Options menu item. Settings that may be worth customising for automated conversions include e.g.

• Load/Save > General: you may e.g. want to disable "Save URLs relative to internet" for security reasons
• Load/Save > Microsoft Office: these options affect conversions of embedded documents, e.g. an Excel table contained in a Word document. If not enabled, the embedded table will likely be lost when converting the Word document to another format.

Connection Mode

OOo inter-process communication can use either TCP sockets or named pipes. The default is to use a TCP socket, on port 2002.

Named pipes have the advantage of not taking up TCP ports (with their potential security implications), and they are marginally faster. However they require a native library to be loaded by the JVM, and this means having to set the java.library.path system property. That's why it's not the default.

The path that needs to be added to java.library.path is different depending on the platform, but it should be the directory in the OOo installation containing libjpipe. On Linux it's e.g.: java -Djava.library.path=/opt/openoffice.org/ure/lib ... while on Windows: java "-Djava.library.path=C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\URE\bin" ...

Sigar Process Implementation

Hyperic SIGAR (System Information Gatherer And Reporter), provides a portable and native way of gathering system information.

Its a much more robust way of handling processes, and we recommend users to use this.

If you want to use Sigar in JODConverter, you have to change the ProcessManager and use SigarProcessManager

``` OfficeManager officeManager = new DefaultOfficeManagerConfiguration() .setProcessManager(new SigarProcessManager()) .buildOfficeManager();

```

SIGAR requires native libraries to be run. For example, minimal requirements to use the SIGAR Java API on Windows would be sigar.jar and sigar-x86-winnt.dll

Here is a complete list of native libraries required for your environment: libsigar-x86-linux.so Linux AMD/Intel 32-bit libsigar-amd64-linux.so Linux AMD/Intel 64-bit
libsigar-ppc-linux.so Linux PowerPC 32-bit
libsigar-ppc64-linux.so Linux PowerPC 64-bit
libsigar-ia64-linux.so Linux Itanium 64-bit
libsigar-s390x-linux.so Linux zSeries 64-bit
sigar-x86-winnt.dll Windows AMD/Intel 32-bit
sigar-amd64-winnt.dll Windows AMD/Intel 64-bit
libsigar-ppc-aix-5.so AIX PowerPC 32-bit
libsigar-ppc64-aix-5.so AIX PowerPC 64-bit
libsigar-pa-hpux-11.sl HP-UX PA-RISC 32-bit
libsigar-ia64-hpux-11.sl HP-UX Itanium 64-bt
libsigar-sparc-solaris.so Solaris Sparc 32-bit
libsigar-sparc64-solaris.so Solaris Sparc 64-bit
libsigar-x86-solaris.so Solaris AMD/Intel 32-bit
libsigar-amd64-solaris.so Solaris AMD/Intel 64-bit
libsigar-universal-macosx.dylib Mac OS X PowerPC/Intel 32-bit
libsigar-universal64-macosx.dylib Mac OS X PowerPC/Intel 64-bit
libsigar-x86-freebsd-5.so FreeBSD 5.x AMD/Intel 32-bit
libsigar-x86-freebsd-6.so FreeBSD 6.x AMD/Intel 64-bit
libsigar-amd64-freebsd-6.so FreeBSD 6.x AMD/Intel 64-bit For an updated list see here.

Including Sigar in your project

There are two ways to include Sigar in your project

One way is to download Sigar distribution manually from here then unzip the file, and include sigar.jar to the classpath and the appropriate native library to java.library.path

However, if you want a more automatic way of doing it, you can add the following to the pom.xml file, and let maven do it for you: ``` org.hyperic sigar 1.6.5.132 org.hyperic sigar-dist 1.6.5.132 zip

org.apache.maven.plugins maven-dependency-plugin 2.2 unpack-dependencies compile unpack-dependencies /sigar-bin/lib/* /sigar-bin/lib/*jar org.hyperic sigar-dist ${project.build.directory}/depends ``` This will create a folder called depends where the native libraries are found. You will need to add this folder to java.library.path.