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The Tuesday 2007-09-18 at 09:42 +0100, G T Smith wrote:
> > Hum!
> >
> > I tried via forms, but I couldn't get it right.
>
> Used the wizard, and I do not remember it being easy or intuitive. It is
> about year ago 1 set this up, and for the life of me I cannot remember
> how I did it at the moment. Should have taken notes :-)
I need a manual for dummies... O:-)
> <snip>
>
> >> Your structure implies a read only join...
> >
> >
> > Huh? Rekall does it read write just fine.
> >
>
> In a strict one to many or many to many relationship an editable table
> view does present a problem. When changing something on the many end of
> a relationship one can be doing at least one of three things, making a
> change which applies the edited record (i.e. correcting the spelling of
> an authors name), introducing a new record (i.e. adding an author for
> an existing book), or changing the record relationship (changing the
> author of the book). A more usual approach would be to have a read only
> table view with a select and edit option (it is also relatively easy to
> program)...
I'm starting to see what you mean.
> > It shows like this:
> >
> > Title Author
> > ------------------ ---------
> > Robots and Empire Asimov ^
> > Rendezvous with Rama Clarke ^
> >
> > The "Author" column fields are drop down lists from which I can choose an
> > author from any author in the authors table.
> >
>
> This is something definitely missing from the OpenOffice stuff, a drop
> down list derived from a database table is useful to have as option .
> With the above you can change author easily, but the other two edits do
> present a couple of issues....
Yes and yes.
>
> However a question remains.... how do you handle something like?...
>
> Programming Perl, by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Jon Orwant ...
>
> :-)
Gotcha! Ie, "gotme". O:-)
I don't have a good solution. What I have is two more fields named "second
author" and "third author". The complex one would be another linked table:
index to book index to authors
---------------+-------------------
1 10
1 11
1 23
1 47
In this way, an indeterminate list of authors can be entered; but I don't
have an easy method of doing that, not being a database programmer.
> In OpenOffice you can currently build (very) basic data entry forms, and
> generate queries and reports for incorporation into OpenOffice documents
That's right, I use it for reports. For instance, to print a list of books
sorted by author so that I don't buy some book I already have ;-)
> (not something I think you can do with ReKall).
It does generate reports, but not in the way I wanted. But I have to test
the current version, though, to see how it has improved. Rekall is
scriptable, too, but I haven't tried.
> On the other hand I
> would definitely not consider OpenOffice for your requirement.... The
> two things have somewhat different focuses.
Pity.
I think of OOo as a replacement for M. Office, and this is a thing Access
could do quite easily. I don't like Access (I have been bitten by it), but
I can't deny the user and design interface are good, for me at least.
So I use rekall, which is pretty good, although it has its quirks too.
- --
Cheers,
Carlos E. R.
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