[Solved] Base Crashing on Relationships

[NJ0E]

I am trying to set up three relationships between 4 seperate tables. In the relationship window (GUI) i can set up the relationships no problem. I hit the save button after each relationship is set up. When I go to close the relationship window after I have completed what I need to do, Base informs me that it will have to shiut down as something caused a crash. When I reopen Base it starts a recovery on an un-named file (I assume the relationship file), says that it has recovered. When I go back to the relationship window there are no relationships set up.

How can I set up relationships without crashing?

I am using openoffice.org-core 1.2.4.1-ubuntu2.1 Thur Nov 20 20:03:24 UTC 2008
Open office 2.4.1

Thanks in advance.

[r4zoli]

I tried on same version and works as desired.
Your installation may be damaged, first delete or best rename your "home/<user>/.openoffice.org2" folder. It will remove all user settings, and after OOo restart will be created again with installation settings.
If not help refresh your OOo installation.

[Villeroy]

Reading this and your previous thread, it seems to me that you stumble upon all the traps at once.
Problem #1: Base is not what it seems to be. http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... 741#p61737 In particular, a Base document (*.odb) it is not another document format for databases. So it is important to keep in mind which database we are talking about. You can work with several types of databases at once. The type is indicated in the status bar (mostly HSQL, but could be MySQL as well)

Problem #2: Base is a frontend only, a bridge to database data that are not necessarily supported by the office suite. Any 3rd party database driver may suffice to serve the data to OOo's tool set. http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... 581#p61573
In particular, you must not run data definition queries against 3rd party databases using the lousy Base GUI. Data definition means everything that creates or edits the structure of a database rather than content.

Problem #3: The OOo version you are using is known to behave badly with Base. It is Ubuntu's compilation of http://go-oo.org/ which is a de-facto fork of Sun's OOo. At least you should install package sun-java in order to use Base with wizards and HSQL. Sun's OOo3 comes with some bug fixes in the Base module and it works pretty well with Ubuntu Hardy. [Tutorial] Installing OOo on Ubuntu, Debian and Co.. You can install 3 in parallel to version 2. Just do not accept to take over the user setting and create your own "desktop integration" with the help of some desktop links.

Problem #4: Once you accepted it's "true nature as database frontend", you may notice that the graphical tools do not cover all the features of the underlying database backend. You can not do certain things by point&click which work flawlessly on the command line. You can access the command line of your database by means of menu:Tools>SQL... and SELECT queries in "direct SQL mode".
[Tutorial] Structured Query Language in Base

[NJ0E]

Well, I removed OOs 2.4.x and loaded 3.0.x.

It let me think that I had it under control!! HA Little did I know. Still having problems with realtions -- now it is complaining that the sources table entries do not match.. Made all of the keys (Primary and Foriegn) the same. At least where I wanted to connect the realtions to. didn't even phase it!! But now that I have the info in hand about the "frontend" I'll look into working directly.

The Current language is HQSL. Now I guess that I will have to learn it and how to work with it. I would really like to get this mastered so that I can get on with what I want to do.

Thanks,

Joe

[Villeroy]

Yep, the HSQL database engine uses the SQL language, which is a common standard across all relational databases and helps to operate any of them independent from a GUI. But even with a GUI at hand, it helps to understand what the GUI does actually (or tries to do). The basics are extremely easy to learn. You can find many thousands of tutorials on the web.
Just one hint how SQL can make life easier.
Base-menu:Tools>SQL...

Code: Select all

SCRIPT '/tmp/sql.txt'

... where the quoted string denotes a path where to dump a text file. The text file will contain all SQL-commands that are necessary to recreate a copy of the current database structure (without content). You may be able to pass over the SQL script to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS Access, MS SQL Server or any similar database engine in order to let it create a clone of the same database structure ("may be able" since there may be slight syntactical differences, easy to fix in a text editor).