Re: LibreOffice Base replacement
On Wed, 20 Nov 2013 10:01:08 +1100
Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:
> On 11/20/13, Joe <joe@jretrading.com> wrote:
> > At the moment I'm trying
> > hard to make LibreOffice Base do some of the things
> > Access was doing in 1995, without crashing.
> > It is around half-way usable, as long as I
> > don't want it to do anything more complicated than
> > phpmyadmin can do with data, which isn't much.
>
> Yes LibreOffice Base needs some love.
>
> Have you considered something Eclipse-based, eg Google's
> WindowBuilder: https://developers.google.com/java-dev-tools/wbpro/
>
> >From memory I think there are other libre options for Eclipse, but
> it's been a couple years since I last did a round of re-searching.
>
> If you do find something appealing, please report back,
> Zenaan
>
>
I'm not so much bothered about the database aspect itself, as forms and
reports. I have a couple of large Access business applications, which
pretty much reflect how I was working ten years ago, and I use only
parts of them now. The data has long since been moved to an SQL server,
and I'm looking at implementing on Linux the parts of the user interface
that I still actually use, such as printing the occasional invoice.
I don't mind hacking the odd table directly to enter small amounts
of data, but producing a formatted print seems to be taking a bit of
doing. There are some reporting applications around, but they seem to
be all intended for PostgreSQL, and I'm running on MySQL/Maria. I don't
really feel like migrating databases and learning a new system just so
I can print things, there has to be another way.
I was a bit terse last night as I spent some time trying to print
addresses. Postal addresses have varying fields present, and I don't
want blank lines in the middle of my printed addresses. My Access
solution involves a large ugly mess of IF statements, but it's simple
and it works beautifully, and I had no success in trying to implement
something similar in LO.
The particular frustrations in LO are that selecting the report wizard
really does crash every open LO document, so I've given up on that, and
the manual editor refuses to switch to report view once there are three
or four text boxes on the page. The error message is incomprehensible,
unless you're extremely familiar with the Sun OOo objects, and I'm not.
I need to close and save the report, then close and safe the Base
document, then reopen it and enter the password again. Then I can see
if my latest edit worked. There *has* to be a better way.
--
Joe
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