Regina Henschel wrote:
Hello,
Ferry Toth schrieb:
So what we need next is forms and reports and possibly clever Calc
sheets that show how to retrieve and analyze data.
That is not the real problem, but filling the database with data. Do you
really think, that OOo community will translate the data, when it has
the size of a "Northwind"-database? And it needs a significant number of
records to give reasonable results, therefore the number of tables and
fields must be small.
Regina, I don't agree with this. The filling of a database is relatively
easy. Just a matter filling the tables, if necessary by importing data
from another source.
1) The difficult thing is keeping data consistant, often done using
relationships (sigh) and code in forms. Adding code to Base is not
straightforward, at least not for me. A sample database showing how to
do this would help greatly. And that is one purpose of the proposed
example database.
2) Another thing database designers are not overly concerned about is
how to get the data out, in a meaningful way. This is demonstrated by
many low cost administrative packages based MSA as well. However, the
end user doesn't collect data just to record history, they want to do
something with it.
For instance we are developing a Time Track application that stores data
in a postgresql server, with some properties relating to project
management and billing.
One way to retrieve the data is through Base, into Calc using the data
pilot. I'm sure it is not evident to everybody how to do this, and it's
only one of the many things you can do with Base. A lot of other stuff
would require programming. For instance who know how to display a graph
in a Base form that is updated by the selection of the form (a more or
less simple thing to do in MSA).
3) Also, building this Calc sheet and the Base database we found short
comings that will probe usefull in further developing both applications.
(for those still interested:
*Using form filters on boolean fields produce an error that an integer
can not be compared to a boolean. Funny, Base nows that the field in the
table is a boolean, because is dislays a checkbox, but when you want to
set the form filter on "Billable" it add the filter Billable = 1
*In the datapilot you want to generate a bill for a customer (a project)
over a certain period. Whoopie, I can select the project, tasks,
billable hours and get totals for everything I need. Unfortunately, I
can only select the time frame by manually excluding each date outside
of the period. I appears the datapilot handles data field as text
(showing each and allowing them to be excluded, instead of values that
can be included between a start and end date)
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