Trouble working with Link to External data

[jaysugar]

Hi. I can't seem to able to import data via a link to external data (Top Menu -> insert -> Link to External Data).These are the steps I took:

1) Top Menu -> insert -> Link to External Data, External data dialogue box comes up.
2) The url is entered into the source box, the data from the url is in the form of text CSV
3) Pressed Enter and the text filter selection comes up, "Text CSV" selected
4) Text Import menu comes up, character set to ASCII, English, from row 2, comma separator. Now the fields box clearly shows a preview example of what it should look like, detecting all the data and separated nicely into columns. Pressed OK to exit the menu...
5) Now back to External data dialogue box, only to be met with an empty box in the "available table/ranges", thereby stopping any importing (OK button is grayed out).

Now since the field box from the text import menu (step 4) was able to detect and show the data from the url, clearly it's not in a perculiar format that requires any special treatment, it's just text csv. To doubly make sure, I went to Top Menu -> File -> Open and use the same url as the file name to open, and it opened just fine without any errors.

Is there a workaround for this problem?

Thanks

[Villeroy]

Use menu:Insert>SheetFromFile with option "Link". The external data feature imports named table ranges from spreadsheets or html.

[jaysugar]

Hello, thanks for the quicky reply. I have tested out the Sheet from File with "Link" option, and afraid it doesn't seem to serve my purpose. From what I can see, the Sheet from File with "Link" links to a static file rather than a URL, and as such, when the url is updated with fresh data, the old static file is not updated (yes, I have tested out with Edit -> Link and pressed the "update" button). [As for why there was a static file in the first place, I believe it is due to windows' integration with internet explorer, which upon file open request from Libreoffice, does a transparent loading of the web page, and as such the file is coindentially saved in IE's internet temp directory, which does happen in this case.]

Perhaps I might have cause misunderstanding when I mentioned in step 2 that the data from url is in form of text csv, it is served out by a web server and is constantly refreshed, hence I tried to use Link to External data in the first place, because it can do refresh upon selected time intervals.

Edit: forgot to add that the data url doesn't have an extension, ie, not http://host.com/data.csv, but is http://host.com/data

Thanks.

[Villeroy]

Under Linux you could update a local copy of the files using some cron job with a built-in downloader such as wget. For Windows you need to find the right tool for this or write your own.
Then you connect a Base document to the directory of downloaded csv file(s), link a preformatted spreadsheet to it and let the import range update every few minutes.

Edit: Insert>SheetFromFile with link option works with http sources. I just tried http://www.openoffice.org/download/md5s ... d5sums.txt

[jaysugar]

Well, I have tried an alternative spreadsheet software and that imported well with regular interval. I believe it's unofficial courtesy to not mention any names, but thanks for the help.

[Villeroy]

Well, I have tried an alternative spreadsheet software and that imported well with regular interval. I believe it's unofficial courtesy to not mention any names, but thanks for the help.

This is not a marketing list. You hardly find any partisanship nor fan boyism in this forum. So what is your alternative spreadsheet software able to pull plain text via http protocol?

[librer]

Such a old problem and it still valid to me. Trying to import the table from this link https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/
After klicking OK in the Text import dialog where you can see the table and its content, there is no available table in the parent dialog to import...

[Villeroy]

That is a JSON structure. Completely unrelated to spreadsheets. It's made for programmers.

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