Hi,
> So in essence, I'm looking for a way they can fill out a form, then > return to the office and upload their changes to a database. I don't > believe they necessarily need to access any data from the database > outside of the office, just to make changes to it when they return. > There are likely to be only around four people using this so > efficiency > is not a high priority. Any suggestions on the best or perhaps > easiest > way to do this? > If you don't need on the spot read/write access to your remote db, then you could always check out the XForm capability that openoffice.org has already built-in. With this, you could design a form, and use that form to bind to a data instance that would be saved locally as a separate xml file, e.g. on pressing a save button in your form. Once back in the office, you could have a server process that would accept the uploaded xml files and process them to extract/verify/validate/insert the data into the database. Of course, if your users have sporadic external access to the network and your remote db, then this step could also be managed. The advantage of this is that you wouldn't have to worry about trying to simultaneously share a single ODB file, which as far as I know doesn't work (reliably and without data loss), or having multiple ODB files floating around being modified by each user according to their own particular desires (queries, new forms, new tables, etc - an admin nightmare). I do seem to recall however that XForms had a feature lack which prevented the creator/admin from completely switching off the form designer toolbar, which meant that the user could still tinker with the form and potentially wreak havoc. I don't know whether that particular inconvenience has since been addressed (or even if it was raised as a feature request). This solution does however require knowledge of XPath, bindings and XML in general, but there is some useful documentation out there. I am currently evaluating this solution with a PHP/MySQL backend to see whether or not it would meet my needs for a particular aspect of my work. Alex --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
