Package org.openoffice.xmerge.converter.palm

Provides classes for converting Palm database data to/from a. More...

Classes
class	PalmDB
	This class contains data for a single Palm database for use during a conversion process. More...
class	PalmDocument
	A. More...
class	PdbDecoder
	Provides functionality to decode a PDB formatted file into a. More...
class	PdbEncoder
	Provides functionality to encode a. More...
class	PdbHeader
	Class used only internally by.
class	PdbUtil
	Contains common static methods and constants for use within the package. More...
class	Record
	Contains the raw bytes for a. More...

Detailed Description

Provides classes for converting Palm database data to/from a.

PalmDocument 

object, which can be used by the framework.

This package provides classes that handle the writing of data to an

OutputStream 

object for the DocumentSerializer interface for; as well as the reading of data from an

InputStream 

object for the framework's DocumentDeserializer interface. Both these framework interfaces are simply converters from server-side documents to device specific documents and vice-versa. Since all Palm databases have a general record oriented format, a Palm database converter specific I/O stream format is specified for the Palm sync client application to handle the byte stream in a generic way. This also means that Palm database converters should read and/or write using this I/O stream format as specified in the next section.

Palm database converter specific I/O stream format

Note that the format of the byte stream is not exactly that of a PDB file encoding. It does not need to contain the PDB header information nor record indices section. Instead, it contains the following ...

   set header
      4 bytes - creator id
      4 bytes - type id
      2 bytes - PDB header version
      2 bytes - PDB header attribute
      unsigned 2 bytes - number of PDB data to follow

   for each PDB,
      32 bytes - name of PDB i
      unsigned 2 bytes - number of records in PDB i

      for each record contained in PDB i,
         1 byte - record attributes
         unsigned 2 bytes - size of record j in PDB i
         x bytes - data

Note that each PDB section is appended by another if there is more than one.

Since the

PalmDocument 

class takes care of the writing and reading of this format through its

write 

and

read 

methods, respectively, this format shall also be referred to as the PalmDocument stream format.

Usage of the classes for the specified I/O stream

When converting from a server document to device document(s), the framework requires writing the device document(s) to an

OutputStream 

object via the

DocumentSerializer 

interface. Note that a single server document may be converted into multiple PDB's on the Palm device. Each worksheet in the document is converted into a

PalmDocument 

. Thus, if there is more than one worksheet in the document, more than one

PalmDocument 

will be produced by the

DocumentSerializer 

.

A

DocumentSerializer 

creates a

ConvertData 

object, which contains all of the

PalmDocuments 

. The write method to write to the given

OutputStream 

. The

PalmDocument 

object will take care of writing the data in the specified format.

A

DocumentDeserializer 

can use the

PalmDocument 

object's read method to fill in all the

PalmDocument 

object's data.

PDB file encoding/decoding

The

PalmDocument 

object's read and write functions are provided by the

PdbDecoder 

and

PdbEncoder 

objects. The

PdbEncoder 

class provides the functionality of encoding a

PalmDB 

object into an

InputStream 

, while the

PdbDecoder 

class provides the functionality of decoding a PDB file into an

OutputStream 

.

Refer to the class description of each for usage.

Important Note

Methods in these classes are not thread safe for performance reasons. Users of these classes will have to make sure that the usage of these classes are done in a proper manner. Possibly more on this later.

TODO list

1. Merge the PalmDB, PdbDecoder and PdbEncoder classes into the PalmDocument class.
2. After reading more on the palm file format spec, I realized that there are certain optional fields that may need to be addressed still, like the appInfo block and sortInfo block.
3. The current PdbDecoder only returns a PalmDB object. There are other information that we may want to expose from the PDB decoding process.
4. Investigate on different language encoding on the Palm and how that affects the PDB name.