[libreoffice-users] Re: Base Date issue

Le 02/03/11 22:07, Leslie D. Martin a écrit :

Hi Leslie,


> Except isn't that the entire point of the field mask 'YYYY'? To tell the
> program that although it is a date field the only portion you will be
> receiving as input is the year portion?

It wouldn't be the first time in Base that a functionality designed to
help the user actually doesn't, or has only been sort-of-implemented. If
I were to look at the question from the developer's point of view
though: how would Base know which date to actually enter into a DATE
field of DDMMYYYY if all the user enters is YYYY ?

Seems to me to be a pretty tall order to meet, unless the developers of
HSQLDB (not Oracle or LibO developers), which is the backend to the
database functionality, decide to implement a data field type of YYYY.
At present, the DATE field type corresponds to that represented by the
function java.sql.date :

http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/sql/Date.html

which as you can see allows for the date to be garnered through the
getYear() method, but this method is not implemented in HSQLDB.

So at present, this is not possible transparently within the database
engine that is provided for OOo and LibO.


> You confirm my thinking that setting the field to some other format is the
> answer, albeit an unsatisfactory answer. I am not seeing an option for a
> 4-digit integer in the field definition options so I guess I'll just have to
> use a basic numeric format for now.

Or a character field. I confirm that you can not modify the length of
the INT field using the table creation wizard. It should be possible to
do this however if you change the line :

SET PROPERTY "sql.enforce_strict_size" false

to

SET PROPERTY "sql.enforce_strict_size" true

which can be found in the SCRIPT file of your ODB file (the ODB file is
merely a ZIP container holding all of the data, the forms, queries,
table definitions). See here for more details :

http://hsqldb.org/doc/guide/ch09.html#datatypes-section


> Well, that's disappointing to hear. Hopefully some of the Base developers
> who have remained loyal to the OO project will soon get tired of Oracle and
> come over to LO.

There is also a move within the LibO developer group to get rid of as
much built-in Java dependency as possible, which means that it is likely
in the long term that the whole Java HSQLDB database thing will become
obsolete, and possibly even removed.


Alex



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