In an UNO extension for OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc (Spreadsheet), written in Java, how can you determine the calling cell inside the implementation of a UDF (spreadsheet function)?

Remarks

  • In Excel/VBA this is possible via Application.Caller
  • The main motivation to get the caller is logging/tracing/debugging, i.e., view the calling cell as part of a stack trace.
  • It should be possible to obtain this information, since built-in functions like "ROW()" and "COLUMN()" do have some knowledge of the calling cell.
  • An application where this possibility is used (for Excel) is Obba, an object handler for spreadsheets. Here the "control panel" provides a list of (Java) exceptions including the calling cell, i.e., the cell is part of the stack trace. See the following screenshot:

Obba Control Panel showing exceptions by spreadsheet cell of calling function

This is also a feature request on the Apache OpenOffice Bugzilla

java user-defined-functions libreoffice openoffice-calc uno
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