Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Welcome beginner. What is your question or comment?
Please try to briefly and clearly tell us: What you want, What you tried, and What happened.
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I would like to distribute a runtime version of a Base application. Is there anyway to distribute an application without the full installation of the OpenOffice Base product? The aim is to control what the user can do. If they open the forms and tables from within OpenOffice, there doesn't seem to be any way to restrict them from modifying a form or looking at a table in design view, for example.
How can I go about this?
Thanks in advance.
Mark

Since OOo is free by any means of the word, you can distribute your database with a whole office suite. You may use a distribution from protableapps.com which is prepared to run from USB stick without the need to install.

There is no 'runtime' in the way you mean. The up side of this is there is no royalty associated with distributing your application, the down side is there is no restriction over what the user can do with the application once they have it.

Thanks for your quick replies. Is there a way to code the application to make it more tamper-free, or is that a major undertaking?

I'm interested in protableapps.com, but I don't think I have the site quite right. What is the exact address?

Thanks again.
Mark

You can find PortableApps here: PortableApps.

The problem you face, of course, is even if you got the source code for OOo (which you can easily do) and made a limited access, tamper-free version of it, if anybody downloaded the full version of OOo they'd bypass all of your 'security'.

There is a major misunderstanding about Base that it is a "database application". It has several "mechanisms" to access many different kinds of databases (file based and server based ones), so you can use a wide variety of external data in Writer and Calc. This is useful for mail merge, statistical analyisis, charting or just pretty formatted database output to some device, office document or PDF file. That's almost all about Base and it's well done, usable and easy enough. Get some existing database, some driver (ODBC, JDBC or one of OOo's SDBC drivers), set up the data source once and enjoy easy import into office documents.
Additionally you may try OOo's input forms for manual input into writable data sources.
The single-file, portable databases document OOo Base offers to create newly from scratch is nothing but an ordinary server-based HSQL database wrapped into a zip-archive (the "database document"). "Opening the document" extracts the database before OOo's integrated HSQL server serves the data to a single, almighty user. Nice tool set to distribute copies of a tiny relational database to users of OpenOffice.org or StarOffice without expecting any level of security or performance.
Still better than spreadsheets, but you need the whole chain of integrated software components (plus Sun's report builder add-on for more professional reports) in order to distribute a "single-file database".
Most of the advanced tools you know from Access are non-existent in OOo. OOo's focus is on document creation.