ActiveCell : the missing api

Calc API provides usefull methods to retreive current informations such as ActiveSheet or CurrentSelection.

If these api covers a lot of cases, some are not handled. Even inside a range selection, there is an active cell, usually the last selected one, depending on the way the range as been selected (from upper-left to bottom-right, bottom-left to upper-right, ...). Unfortunatelly, the CurrentSelection is only able to catch the range itself. The same problem occurs on multiple selections

This ActiveCell concept is missing and may disturb new commers from other office suite scripting like VBA.

Nevertheless, the OOo API allows to retreive this information. We can define a function that returns the cell (in OOoBasic but will work in other OOo supported languages via UNO such as Python or Java).

function ActiveCell()

 'retreives viewData

  ViewData = ThisComponent.CurrentController.ViewData

 'many sub-separators, unify - The content remains mysterious

    ViewData = join(split(ViewData,";"),"/")

    ViewData = join(split(ViewData,":"),"/")

    ViewData = join(split(ViewData,"+"),"/") 'handles IV65535 !

 'split the string

    ViewData = split(ViewData,"/")

 'retreives active positions

    activeCol = ViewData(6)

    activeRow = ViewData(7)

 'get the activeCell

    activeSheet = thisComponent.CurrentController.ActiveSheet

    ActiveCell = activeSheet.getCellByPosition(activeCol,activeRow)

End function

This is very tricky as the CurrentController.ViewData is poorly documented. The returned string is something like "100/60/0;0;tw:270;5/23/0/0/0/0/2/0/0/0/0;;". What does it means ?
The only way seems to look into sources as the IDL reference does not give informations
Once the information clarified, this will go to the code snippets repository.

The best would be to enrich the API with some CurrentController.ActiveCell though ...