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Re: keyword expansion for MS Office files

From: Henrik Sundberg <storangen_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 3 May 2008 09:40:53 +0200

2008/5/3 Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2008b_at_ryandesign.com>:
> On May 2, 2008, at 7:39 PM, Oren Eini (Murphy & Associates) wrote:
>
>>> My client is interested in using Subversion for versioning documents such
>>> as
>>> MS Office files. They would like keyword substitution on these files for
>>> things like Revision number and date.
>>>
>>> I just tested this with a Word document and it seems to work fine. I used
>>> fixed length keywords to avoid corrupting the file and Subversion did a
>>> fine
>>> job. I tried the keywords both on the actual document and in the file
>>> properties area (using custom properties).
>>>
>>> So my question is: is this feature safe on non-text files such as MS
>>> Office
>>> files? Or will I get into trouble and corrupt files? Has anyone
>>> implemented
>>> this successfully?
>>
>> If you would use that on the text versions (MS Office has XML versions),
>> that should be safe.

Do you mean OOXML? In that case I think you are wrong. Both OOXML and
ODF store zipped XML. The substitution will not work in zip-archives.
I think it would be a great feature to allow key substitution in
zip-archives with .od* extension.

> If we believe that it's unlikely that a string like "$Revision:: $"
> would otherwise appear in Word's binary format, then it's ok to use in Word
> binary files too. I believe the fixed-width keywords were created exactly so
> that they could be used in binary formats like (binary) Word.

Since Microsoft keep changing their binary formats, I don't like to
rely on the formats keeping strings as is.

/$

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Received on 2008-05-03 09:41:20 CEST

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