Improve the Office Importer Application Administration

In its latest version, the Office Importer application is complex to use in a production environment. The feature required for the OfficeImporter to be used in a production environment are as follows.

The XWiki admin must be able to select whether to manage the OOo server from the XWiki administration page or to use a remote server already runninng OOo. If he chooses to use a remote server, more than 1 wiki instance must be able to connect to that server.

Select whether to use a local OOo server or a remote OOo server

• Ability to define this setting in xwiki.cfg or xwiki.properties
• Ability to overwrite the setting on .../xwiki/bin/admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences?editor=globaladmin&section=XWiki.OfficeImporterAdmin

If the administrator chooses to use a remote server, he needs to be able to set the following parameters:

Remote Open Office server managed from outside the wiki

• Ability to set the remote server port & path in xwiki.cfg or xwiki.properties
• Ability to overwrite those values in fields on .../xwiki/bin/admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences?editor=globaladmin&section=XWiki.OfficeImporterAdmin

If the administrator chooses to manage the OOo server from XWiki, he needs to be able to make the OOo server start & restart automatically when XWiki starts & restarts and to set the following parameters:

OpenOffice server managed from the wiki interface

• Ability to set the server path in xwiki.cfg or xwiki.properties
• Ability to overwrite the server path in a field on .../xwiki/bin/admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences?editor=globaladmin&section=XWiki.OfficeImporterAdmin
• Provide an option to set the OOo server to start automatically when XWiki gets started
  • Ability to define this setting in xwiki.cfg or xwiki.properties
  • Ability to overwrite this setting on .../xwiki/bin/admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences?editor=globaladmin&section=XWiki.OfficeImporterAdmin

Additionally, the wiki must be able to know whether the OOo server is up, running and ready to work when displaying some pages. For instance, when displaying the XWiki/OfficeImporter page, it might be needed to print a warning to say that the server is currently unavailable before the user tries to import a file. Thus the OOo application must provide a efficient way for the status of the remote server to be polled (server ping every 5 minutes + caching maybe ?).