Merging cells vertically in .odt

Hello, I need to fill a .odt table with a php array and merge the cells that have the same value in the first cell. I need exactly what "ope=mergecell" does in the .docx manual example (merging cells with same "rank" value), but I read it doesn't work for LibreOffice.
Im wondering if there is anything I can do to make it work, like formatting my php array in a specific way and using other kind of tags?  The data is already ordered by the merge value.

Hi Nico,

This feature is more complicated for LibreOffice than for Ms Word because LibreOffice use a special entity <table:covered-table-cell/> for cells that are covered by a merged cell.
So it can be done, but not the same way as for Ms Word tables.

Preparing data w'ont help you for this. The point is to transform a <table:table-cell> entity into <table:covered-table-cell/>.

I think this will be included in the next OpenTBS version.