Can Librewriter do a headless mailmerge

[Vie1beeg]

I have Librewriter generating invoices from through a mail-merge. The data comes from a spreadsheet.

Trying to figure out how to do the mail-merge automatically. I have a spreadsheet in Calc that is printed out every morning via a cron job no problem. However when I call “soffice --headless --print-to-file test.odt” I only get the printed template without fields rather than the completed mail merge.

Is there any way to call the mail merge from the command line, or from a macro in the odt file?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[kunda]

can you share your workflow of generating invoices ? I’d like very much to do the same

[vmiklos]

A macro in the document is actually an option. The com.sun.star.text.MailMerge service, together with the basic createUnoService() function probably allows you to automatically perform a mail merge from a macro. The sw/qa/extras/mailmerge/mailmerge.cxx testcase in the source code uses this method to automatically test mail merge.

[Vie1beeg]

This is what I used in the end.

It takes the result of a query of my libreoffice database file and does a mailmerge automatically. I run it on as a cron job every morning to generate packing slips for my business.

   Sub mergeit()
	oMailMerge = CreateUnoService("com.sun.star.text.MailMerge")
        'Set MailMerge properties
        'http://www.openoffice.org/api/docs/common/ref/com/sun/star/text/MailMerge.html
    oMailMerge.DocumentURL = "file:///{yourfile}.odt"  'Source document (forward slashes only)
    oMailMerge.DataSourceName = "{your database}"                         'name of data source (included in source document)
    oMailMerge.CommandType = 1                                 '0 = table name, 1 = query name, 3 = SQL command
    oMailMerge.Command = "TODAY"                                'name of table in data source
    oMailMerge.OutputType = 2                                  '1 = printer, 2 = file, 3 = email
    oMailMerge.OutputUrl = "file:///{your output dir}"                  'output directory (forward slashes only)
        'There are 2 ways to generate output: one single file or multiple individual files
        '1. Destination is a single file
    oMailMerge.FileNameFromColumn = False       'explicitly set output file name
    oMailMerge.FileNamePrefix = "{output}"        'output file name (excl. extension)
    oMailMerge.SaveAsSingleFile = True          'save as single file
	oMailMerge.SaveFilter = "writer_pdf_Export"
        '2. Output to individual files
        'oMailMerge.FileNameFromColumn = True       'get file name from data source column
        'oMailMerge.FileNamePrefix = "column1"      'name of data source column
        'oMailMerge.SaveAsSingleFile = False        'save as multiple files
        'Execute MailMerge
        'The execute method takes a sequence (array) of com.sun.star.beans.NamedValue objects.
        'We can also feed an empty array. In that case the default values above are used.

	oMailMerge.execute(Array())
	oMailMerge.Dispose()
	thiscomponent.store
	thiscomponent.close(true)
	stardesktop.terminate
End Sub

[TechColab]

Hi, newbie to LO automation. Could you tell me where the above example would be in?
The comment below suggests that it’s not a macro within the document (but could be).
I.e. In what file would I put that & what command line would I use to execute it? Thanks.