DDE link between two spreadsheets: updated values not saved

[timrichardson]

Rather than a minimal test case, I will attach two real spreadsheets.
The no._4_neis_spreadsheets... .ods has a tab called Cash Flow Y1.
On this tab, row 19 uses the DDE formula to dynamically link to a second spreadsheet, also attached (no 2 marketing action plan)
The values in the no._4_ spreadsheet are old; they do not reflect the current values in the source.

Bug:
1) open the no.4 spreadsheet, and choose to update values from the linked source.
2) the document is marked as "dirty".
3) save the document.
4) open it again. Choose NOT to update linked values. Observe that the linked values have reverted to the old values, despite the save in step 3.

[pluby]

Thank you for the steps to reproduce this bug. With your steps, I can reproduce the bug in NeoOffice 3.1.2 and 3.2 Beta.

I have bad news: I can also reproduce this bug in both OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 (the version that NeoOffice is based on) and OpenOffice.org 3.3 (their latest version) so this is definitely an OpenOffice.org bug.

Unfortunately, our very limited donations only supports one half time developer (me) so this limits the current scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X and fixing any critical crashing and hanging bugs that our users find. Because of these limits, fixing OpenOffice.org's feature bugs is outside of that scope.

What I can do is give you a workaround that will avoid this bug. The bug is that you are putting the DDE function inside of an array operator (that is it is inside "{}"). It is using this array operator that triggers the bug. So, what I did in the attached modified version of your no._4 spreadsheet file was to put a DDE function in each of the cells so that the return value of each DDE function is a single value, not an array.

Not only does this stop display of the "do you want to update links" dialog every time you open the spreadsheet, but it correctly save the last values fetched by the DDE functions.

Does my workaround work for you?

Patrick

[timrichardson]

Thanks Patrick. I reported the bug at LibreOffice.

[pluby]

[timrichardson]

Yes, it did, and I mentioned that in the bug report to LibreOffice because it helps isolate the problem.

[timrichardson]

For completeness sake, I reported this upstream.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36311

They could not reproduce, but said that DDE is flakey and may not be used for paste link in future. When I pointed out that at least it updated dynamically, unlike simple links which require manual update, there was not much insight.

I tried to make a simple test case to help them reproduce ... but I could not reproduce!

[pluby]