Extracting metadata from OpenOffice documents

Chapter 3 Operating with Metadata in Media Files recipes described how services work to extract metadata embedded in various files. There are times when no extractor exists for the file format that you need. In this case, you can write a service to extract that metadata from the files.

We will now cover how to extract metadata that is stored in popular OpenOffice documents. These files can be created in Writer, and have the extension .odt. This extension will also work for other files created by the OpenOffice suite, including .ods from Calc, and .odp from Impress.

Note

To learn more about OpenOffice, go to http://www.openoffice.org.

This is just one of the multitudes of services you can create. For example, you could create a service to extract the contents of a text file from various formats, or to handle user authentication, both frontend and backend.

Furthermore, you can utilize services in your own extensions, decoupling functionality from the...