Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Please, I'm new and quickly getting a grasp of OOBase. Please, is there a way to simply edit an SQL data that has already been created, or do I have to keep going to either use ALTER or rather at some point, delete and recreate the table using SQL?

You can click the Tables icon in the left pane and then right click on the icon of the specific table and select Edit. YOu can then change column names and types. Is that what you are after?

That's not what I want. What I want is to do whatever correction in the sql format without having to use the Alter function.

The method I mentioned allows you to do the equivalent of ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN, ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN, and at least some forms of ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN. For example, you can change the column type from Integer to Double. What kind of ALTER command are you not able to do through the GUI method I described?

davik4life your question is rather vague.
ALTER TABLE is the most versatile way to edit the structure of a table. The table GUI in Base can perform many but not all the tasks that ALTER TABLE can.
To edit the data stored in a table, the SQL commands are DELETE, INSERT and UPDATE. While you can edit data directly in a Base table, Forms allow you to design a better GUI to accomplish many of those tasks.

Data definition: CREATE, ALTER, DROP a table or index. This is what you do before working with the database. You should not need any of these commands once the database is in use since the only thing that changes during normal operation is the amount of rows but not the amount of columns.

Data manipulation: INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE table rows. This is what you are supposed to do manually with input forms.

A SELECT statement selects rows from one table for data manipulation.
SELECTs from many tables are not editable in most cases but useful for reporting.
With forms, subforms and list boxes you can edit data from many related tables on one form.