OPC implementation test documents

re: OPC implementation test documents

Ben Langhinrichs — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:20:15 GMT

Interesting post. This sort of overview information is really helpful. Does this mean that the minimum requirement is both an "_rels\.rels" file and a "[Content_Types].xml", or is the latter optional if you don't scramble the parts?

re: OPC implementation test documents

dmahugh — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:43:05 GMT

Sorry for the delay in moderating comments here -- connectivity has been poor for me the last 24 hours ...

Yes, those two are always required, as well as an officeDocument part, or "start part." For a word-processing document, that's all you need, and for a spreadsheet document you need a worksheet part in addition to the workbook start part. For a presentation, you need several parts because the slide is based on a slide layout, which is based on a slide master, and you need a notes master and a few other things as well.

The content types part is always required, and its name and location is fixed: it must be [Content_Types].xml, and it must be in the root of the package. That's so that a consumer always knows where to look to see the manifest of content types in the package, which is something a consumer usually wants to do before anything else.

Relationships are always in a _rels folder that is at the same level (in the folder hierarchy) as the part that is the source of the relationship, and the relationships part's name is formed by adding ".rels" to the source part. So, for example, relationships from whatever.xml are in the _rels folder in the same location as whatever.xml, and they're stored in a part named whatever.xml.rels.

The "package relationships" are a special case, relationships that are from the package to something inside it. Since the source part doesn't have a name in this case, the relationships are stored in a part named ".rels" with a filename and no extension. Package relationships include the officeDocument relationship to the start part, and also relationships to things like metadata or digital signatures.

Hey, here's a question for anyone reading this: is there a way to manually create a .rels file from scratch in Windows? That is, create a file with an extension but no filename? When I create one from scratch manually, I always do it with a filename, then go to a DOS prompt and rename it to .rels, but I've not found a way to do that in Windows. (Perhaps this is due to my age -- I rather miss command-line interfaces, frankly. :-))

Glad you found this helpful, and I'm planning to do a few more posts on these sorts of topics soon.

re: OPC implementation test documents

hAl — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:36:49 GMT

@Doug

With Notepad

Use "Save as"

Choice filetype to save as "All files"

Add the preferred extension to the name.

re: OPC implementation test documents

dmahugh — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:10:48 GMT

Hey thanks, hAl! That works like a champ. I thought I tried that, but I guess not.

re: OPC implementation test documents

hAl — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:39:58 GMT

It is always amusing explaining someone working at Microsoft how their own products work

;-)

re: OPC implementation test documents

John Hensley — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:26:34 GMT

Hey Doug, do you remember when Scientific American was the best in its class?

Look what it publishes now:

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=micro_oft_gets_spanked_twice_in_one_week&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&more=1#comments

HAHAHAH MICRO$OFT GET IT?

re: OPC implementation test documents

dmahugh — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:31:59 GMT

Yes I do, John. Scientific American linking to ... Slashdot? My father, who built shelves in my closet to hold 10 years of Scientific American (1958-1968), just rolled over in his grave.

Although I sort of liked the cartoon. Perhaps we can convince the fanatics to all use cartoons going forward. It eliminates a lot of the tedium of reading their arguments.

Open XML Resources for Developers

Doug Mahugh — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:49:16 GMT

Like many people, I thought we'd know the official outcome of the DIS 29500 process today, but it looks

Doug Mahugh : OPC implementation test documents

Dating — Tue, 27 May 2008 02:13:12 GMT

In my presentation at TechEd SEA yesterday, I explained the importance of writing code against the relationship structure of an OPC package instead of hard-coding URIs that point to specific part names in specific folders. That's a key concept for buildin

Doug Mahugh : OPC implementation test documents

Weddings — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:49:05 GMT

Testing Office’s ODF Implementation

Doug Mahugh — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:32:22 GMT

In this blog post, I’m going to cover some of the details of how we approached the challenges of testing