Table name actually required

[guedressel]

The class Table does not require the argument name to be set (defaults to None), but during initialization name() setter is called anyways. This leads to an exception if name is None in https://github.com/jdum/odfdo/blob/master/odfdo/table.py#L809

[jdum]

Hi, thanks for the report, you are right.

Short answer: I'm not going to fix it right now, but it's on my to-do list. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Long answer:
This also happens in most classes, they all accept None for parameters that should be mandatory. The reason is a not very wise initial choice of the software architecture, I need to build on the fly (and quickly) instances from XML strings. The current process is naive, I would have to modify it to use the __new__() constructor everywhere. But this would require adapting all classes, and many tests to ensure full compatibility with current versions. So: "Not today".

BTW: I will improve soon the list of allowed characters in table names for compatibility with LibreOffice, but this wont solve this bug.

[jdum]

A few additional comments to go beyond this question (and keep track of it for myself):

• It would be very nice to remove many "None" arguments allowed when a value is actually required, both for documentation and ease of use.

• I have a POC that does this, but it would require a change to the API.

• We also need some feature to easily permit advanced usage, bypassing the __init__() and its required arguments:

  • "Correct" way to initialize a table :

  t = Table("abc")
  # producing :
  t.serialize()
  '<table:table table:name="abc"/>'

  • But we want an easy way to make a crude XML content:

  # today
  t = Element.from_tag("table:table")
  # producing :
  t.serialize()
  '<table:table/>'
  # and then we can do:
  t.name = "abc"
  # producing :
  t.serialize()
  '<table:table table:name="abc"/>'

  So I may add some Table.from_xml(), defaulting to the minimal XML content.

• All of this for all classes. This would be in a future version 4.0.