About a year ago, I was trying to develop a database to organize my genealogical research. For those who do this kind of thing and are familiar with what out's there, I was looking at something with the capabilities of Bygones (which is no longer being updated) and Clooz (which is not free, and which I haven't even been able to use yet because of the tight restrictions on the "free trial" -- i.e., I used up all my chances just trying to get it to work on Vista).
I ran into quite a few showstoppers, despite some great help here, and quit working on it last year -- again. Recently, I decided to give this another try and have had great success with my local web server set-up using PHP, MySQL, HTML and ODTPHP -- so I know I can do it. Unfortunately, doing it that way, it's really not feasible to make it publicly available. And there's enough work involved it would be a shame for just one person to be able to use it, especially considering the lack of alternatives. But my uber-geek days are long behind me. Technology advanced much faster than I did, so I'm now at the point where I can get things to do what I want them to do, but I'm definitely not up on everything I should be. So before I jump into this thing with both feet again -- i.e., trying to get develop this with OOo Base -- I have a few questions for you guys who *do* know what you're doing: One of the problems that brought it to a screeching whoa was the inability to browse a directory, select a file, and have the file name saved to the DB. Drew, you told me a couple of times you'd send me the code to make this work, but if you did, I didn't get it. Sorry! Since I can manage to do pretty much what I want with PHP, I'm thinking if I learn the language OOo uses for macros, I can do the same with OOo Base? I'm aware of Andrew Pitonyak's book and macro site. Is his book "the source" for the language? Like a "OOo Macros Bible?" Is there another, or additional, book that I could use? I'm not sure how "distribution" would work. People who wanted to use it would have to download OOo, of course, and then the .odb file. But how could the forms, queries and reports be updated later without destroying the user's data? I know how to do this with MySQL, but not OOo Base. The other problem I had was with reports. The OOo Base reports are not suited at all for this data. I need to generate .odt documents from the form data -- is this possible? Or, is what I *have* been able to accomplish with my local web server set-up so different that I should just stick with that and forget trying to do anything "bigger?" Thanks! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
