Re: [office] [OASIS Issue Tracker] Updated: (OFFICE-3759) Inability to recognize errors

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca>]

Hi Patrick,

On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 17:43 -0600, Patrick Durusau wrote:

> Can you expand a bit on your example?
> 
> That is when you say: "Inability to recognize errors" do you mean:
> 
> 1) The format distinguishes errors from strings but in this case a 
> failure elsewhere doesn't define which should be applied?
> 
> 2) The format fails to specify different formats for errors versus 
> strings but errors vs. strings are well defined.
> 
> 3) The format fails to distinguish errors versus strings in all cases.
> 
> 4) Some other point that I have overlooked.
> 
> Sorry, despite your careful example it isn't clear where the difficulty 
> lies.
> 

Let me start over. Take your favourite Spreadsheet program. Enter the
formula:
=IF(RAND()>0.5;"#DIV0!";1/0)
and evaluate it.

This formula evaluates either to a  #DIV0! error or to the "#DIV0!"
string.

With default formatting, in AOO 3.4, LO 3.4, Gnumeric 1.10.x or 1.11.x
the cell content will be left aligned if the formula evaluated to a
string and right aligned if it evaluated to an error value.

Now save this to an ODF file. Assuming that this is done according to
the ODF specs (how I understand it) we get (of course with various
style-names):

<table:table-cell table:style-name="Gnumeric-default"
table:formula="of:=IF(RAND()&gt;0.5;&quot;#DIV0!&quot;;1/0)"
office:value-type="string" office:string-value="#DIV/0!">
<text:p>#DIV/0!</text:p>
</table:table-cell>

We will get the same file content independent of whether the formaula
evaluated to an error or to a string.

(Note that it is a known bug that neither AOO nor LO saves error
according to specs, so if you try this in those programs you will see
something different in the error case.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37993 and
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=102958 )

Since both cases (evaluation yielded error and evaluation yielded
string) are to be stored in identical ways it seems to be impossible to
open this file and to be able to know how to show this content.

I would propose that we should have an
 office:value-type="error" office:error-value="#DIV/0!"
to separate these two cases.

Andreas

> On 5/23/2012 7:15 PM, OASIS Issues Tracker wrote:
> >       [ http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-3759?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]
> >
> > Andreas Guelzow  updated OFFICE-3759:
> > -------------------------------------
> >
> >      Description:
> > Consider the following file snippet:
> >
> > <table:table-cell table:style-name="Gnumeric-default" table:formula="of:=IF(RAND()&gt;0.5;&quot;#DIV0!&quot;;1/0)" office:value-type="string" office:string-value="#DIV/0!">
> > <text:p>#DIV/0!</text:p>
> > </table:table-cell>
> >
> > There appears to be no way to determine whether the cell currently contained an error or a string. (Note the for the given expression both is possible.)
> > If the cell format yields different results for errors than strings (for example in Gnumeric the default alignment differs), than this file can not be properly displayed.
> >
> >    was:
> > Consider teh following file snippet:
> >
> > <table:table-cell table:style-name="Gnumeric-default" table:formula="of:=IF(RAND()&gt;0.5;&quot;#DIV0!&quot;;1/0)" office:value-type="string" office:string-value="#DIV/0!">
> > <text:p>#DIV/0!</text:p>
> > </table:table-cell>
> >
> > There appears to be no way to determine whether the cell currently contained an error or a string. (Note the for the given expression both is possible.)
> > If the cell format yields different results for errors than strings (for example in Gnumeric the default alignment differs), than this file can not be properly displayed.
> >
> >
> >> Inability to recognize errors
> >> -----------------------------
> >>
> >>                  Key: OFFICE-3759
> >>                  URL: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-3759
> >>              Project: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC
> >>           Issue Type: Improvement
> >>           Components: Table
> >>     Affects Versions: ODF 1.2
> >>             Reporter: Andreas Guelzow
> >>
> >> Consider the following file snippet:
> >> <table:table-cell table:style-name="Gnumeric-default" table:formula="of:=IF(RAND()&gt;0.5;&quot;#DIV0!&quot;;1/0)" office:value-type="string" office:string-value="#DIV/0!">
> >> <text:p>#DIV/0!</text:p>
> >> </table:table-cell>
> >> There appears to be no way to determine whether the cell currently contained an error or a string. (Note the for the given expression both is possible.)
> >> If the cell format yields different results for errors than strings (for example in Gnumeric the default alignment differs), than this file can not be properly displayed.
> 

-- 
Andreas J. Guelzow, PhD, FTICA
Concordia University College of Alberta

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