I've created a distinct question for this fourth point: It's very crude, but I can probably work out a way to use what I've got now to produce what I need - but I'm still hoping that someone can point me towards a better way of doing this - particularly since I'll need to figure out some way of positioning the shapes appropriately, which wont be trivial. I have some very basic (and incomplete) code which can create shapes and connect them, which can be seen here: I've started playing with the XML route - I saved an empty file, and a file with a single object, and compared the two (treating as zips) to see the difference, then repeated a few times with different changes to help understand what's going on.

I'm doing this with Railo (CFML), but I can also work with Java, or convert snippets from other readable languages. Not bothered if the example code uses the OO API, or just modify XML files inside a zipped template - so long as it lets me do the above things easily enough. I don't want to spend hours reading about some 'UNO' thing - I just want code examples that I can adapt as required.

Ideally, auto-organise things into sensible positions.Insert flow chart shapes with specified properties.Create a new ODG document with specified page settings.Since there's a lot of steps to show (and may change in future) but I can extract the data, I want to automate the creation with the following steps: I want to create a flowchart in OpenOffice Draw.

Using openoffice draw tutorial