Andrew Jensen wrote:
Hi Drew,
The question really is this : Is it the interface or the documentation,
or a combination of both.
So, if anyone would like - download the file, take a look at the form.
Ask youself a question. If you didn't know much about database's in
general and Base spricifically - in other words if you leaned heavily on
the wizards to get things done - would you be able to reproduce this
form? If not - is there some way Base could be enahnced to make it so?
The same things often have a funny way of occurring out of the blue all
at the same time, because somebody a question similar to the OP just a
week or so ago on the OOo French native-lang list. Somebody there has
come up with a solution too, no doubt very similar to your own, so it
just goes to show that it is really a very commonly sought after task.
IMHO, what lacks most is the handholding or the learn by example
templates. In other Office Suites, such as FileMaker Pro, Access or
Lotus Approach, the software editors include templates and working
functional mini-DB apps that let you get off the ground very quickly and
then enable you to progress onto greater things. OOo is different in
this respect in that it doesn't include a single functional db app in
its download package. OK, it includes the tables that let you set up
such an app (Invoicing, Personal, Business, Collections, etc), but once
the initial tables are created and the ODB setup done, there is nothing
to show you how to do the magic of gluing all of the components
together, and the references to the documentation are, well, spartiate
and dispersed, at the best. This obviously has a historical reason,
because the Base Module as an independently recognised development
module has only recently been promoted to the Big League to play with
the likes of Calc and Writer, and also because those poor understaffed
people in the Base dev team have had to put priorities into
functionality rather than ease of use, with limited ressources for the rest.
Just to cite an example : the OLH has about 8 pages in total on Report
Generation, all of them relatively succinct. Although Forms are given a
more elaborate treatment, there are no real world examples in the OLH to
supplied template DBs as with the competing products that give beginners
the push-start that they need.
So maybe that's the reason why questions like thos of the OP come up so
often here and on the forums. Try telling a newbie that in order to
validate data entry from a drop down combobox control that he has bound
to a table, he has to write a macro to write the corresponding data into
the table using programming objects he'd never even dreamed of, and then
bind that macro to the on_click event of the control. Most newbies eyes
will simply glaze over ;-)
Alex
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