OpenOffice.org: platform specific code to save a file

In the last couple of days I looked into OpenOffice.org basic code to save data to a temporary file. The code should work on any platform (Unix, Windows, ...).

So I needed to find two things to get to the desired result:

• A way to determine the platform type
• A location where to store temporary files (platform dependent)
• Here's the final code snippet

A way to determine the platform type

All I could find was the getGuiType() function which returns

• 1 for Windows
• 3 for MacOS
• 4 for Unix
  and a repeated comment that this function exists for downward compatibility without explaining what the current approach should be.

Note that there is no distinction between OS versions like Windows XP vs. Windows Vista or Solaris vs. Linux.

A location where to store temporary files (platform dependent)

For MacOS and Unix systems /tmp is the obvious place to store temporary files (/var/tmp would probably also ok, even better a user specific dir like /var/tmp/$USER but one would need to ensure first that it really exists and is writable).
On Windows that is a little more complex but the environment variable TEMP seems to be set for all users (different though for each user) and thus a good choice.

Code snippet

' This code creates a temporary file called 'data.lst'
' with a path which works for each OS
Dim sUrl As String
Dim sFile As String
sFile = "/data.lst"
If GetGuiType = 1 Then
  sUrl = "file:" + Environ("TEMP") + sFile
Else
  sUrl = "file:///tmp" + sFile
End If

' Now create some data and store them into the temp file
Dim myData()    'Array to store some data
' Fill myData with contents assuming there are n data points
' ReDim myData(n)
' myData(0) = ...
' myData(1) = ...
' ...

' Call function SaveDataToFile from the OpenOffice.org Macros library 'Tools -> UCB'
SaveDataToFile(sUrl,myData())

A safer approach would be to use an environment variable (e.g. TEMP) for any OS, check whether this env var exists and the value is a writable directory and then use it but safer means (as almost always) more coding. /tmp was invented for the lazy :-)