Help creating forms for a database front-end

Micah · Guest

Hi, I'm making a database front-end using open office and starbasic (an experiment in Access replacement...) and cannot figure out how to set the focus on specific controls. Does anyone have any code for this?

I suppose as long as I'm writing a post, I'll ask a question about documentation as well. Currently, in order to figure out just what an object (err, service) is capable of, I use dbg_methods/properties and dump the results to emacs. This is the only way I have found to see all of the methods and properties of an object in one place. Is there any documentation or reference that is set up in a similar format, which allows me to quickly browse through exposed methods and properties on a per-service basis?

Thanks!

cwchia

micahmason · Newbie Joined: 12 May 2003 Posts: 1 Location: Chicago, IL

Well, I've got a front end up and running using OO1.1beta on redhat 8.0. It connects to a local MySQL 4.0 through UnixODBC + MyODBC. I put it into a Calc sheet so that I can have multiple forms for the users to see (i.e sheet one is for contacts, sheet two is for agencies, sheet three will be inventory). Since I couldn't find a tab control to allow me to have all forms on one page, I did it this way, and it works well.

Today my teammate and I are going to attempt to access the database across the network, and next week we'll be getting it to work on both the win2k machines and redhat machines. I was planning to write up the results on what it took to get this done. I can post that here as well.

So far, I agree, OO as an access replacement is not for the casual user. After we get this all working, I'm going to write-up my results and see if its not possible to get a fairly straight-forward How-to document that details how to do it. I think its getting close. The one thing I would like to be able to do is build interfaces to one-to-many relationships with no coding. Its easy enough to build a query to do it, but if you want to link a query to your current record you need to use named arguments, and added rows to the many table requires coding (as far as i could figure it anyway). If this could be solved that would make OO much more suitable for small databases. Admittedly I don't know much about foreign keys and did not implement them, so that may be the problem here.

Alas, the issue you showed me doesn't mention how to set the focus to a control programmatically. if you know how to do that, thats the last thing I need to do to pretty-up my interfaces. Thanks!

dfrench · Posted: Fri May 16, 2003 4:40 pm Post subject:

Have a look at the developers guide with the sdk:
OpenOffice.org1.0.2_Beta_SDK/docs/DevelopersGuide/Forms/Forms.htm#1+1+Introduction
This has a section on focussing the controls.

I built a contact management system using OOo forms and mySQL. Supporting the one-many relationships with form and sub-form components was simple enough once I had got the knack of using the forms editor. This did all the forms navigation stuff, inserts and deletions. The only coding I did was around some button events to change the filter property on the form which operates like a roladex (click B and it lists clients begining with B).

I look forward to your 'how to ... '. There is a documentation project on OOo which could find a home for that and save the rest of us hacking in the dark.

cwchia · Posted: Mon May 19, 2003 1:45 am Post subject:

thingkcp · Newbie Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 2