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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Review of Kexi
From:       Jarosław Staniek <js () iidea ! pl>
Date:       2005-10-14 21:07:25
Message-ID: 43501E0D.3030303 () iidea ! pl
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Marcel,Thanks for the article on KOffice.
As Kexi maintainer I'd like to clarify some things about the application.
First, if you allow this, my suggestion for your future articles about applications \
that are new to you, would be that you could try to contact developers and inform \
them about problems in performing even most fundamental tasks (as in your case in \
Kexi). We're supporting users and documentation / article authors, with good effects. \
In Kexi case, reach us at #kexi IRC channel or use email. Due to lack of englis user \
documentation (it exists in polish, translation to english is in progress), \
contacting Kexi Team was a solution for you. As I am also LinuxMagazine reader (and \
very occasional author), I expect that articles are there to help me with (sometimes \
problematic) features that are maybe ready to use but not obvious. I believe this is \
why users choose to read the magazine. Reprinting online manuals is not enough, it's \
not LM style. That's why I suggested you to try to contact authors in case of FOSS, \
especially in case of  software being in active development stage. Below I will refer \
to Kexi 0.9, as is this was your Kexi version at the time of writing the article. \
Some citations from http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/60/KOffice_1.4_Review.pdf, \
page 38: 1. "[..] Kexi was unable to establish a connection to the MySQL server."
First, sorry but I was surprised to see article displaying error messages in Linux \
Magazine, while it was planned as an explanation of app's features.The message box \
you have presented your readers is not an error but a kind of verbose information to \
user what to do to connect. We decided it's better than doing nothing or hide a \
button (by the way, it's working now in 1.0-pre). Kexi documentation at \
kexi-project.org, eg. FAQ - Answer 1.2, mentions what is required to be able to \
connect to a database server. Among other things, you need to think about permissions \
- no single tool will allow you to overlook this step. MySQL and PostgreSQL are fully \
supported data backends. Contact the Team is you want more help, e.g. mentioning what \
error message you have seen when tried to create a MySQL database. 2. "A primary key \
needs to exist for each table; [..]Kexi can't edit the data if the key does not \
exist. " This is the case when you use any SQL database. It's not spreadsheet. In \
Kexi 1.0 I've managed to find tricky a workaround for postgresql and file-based \
projects. MySQL is not powerfull enough for this though. 3. "Date/ Time fields are \
not usable in the current version; you can only use the date field, but time entries \
are not possible. This said, there is no way to enter a date manually; users are \
forced to click their way through the appropriate KDE widget. And Kexi makes all \
kinds of strange suggestions for the date (Figure 6)." I agree. A bad explanation is \
as bad as "The problem is known to be quite internal (Qt3)". Current workaround is as \
simple as: after pressing enter (to edit the time/date field) and the just click on \
the section (e.g. year) you want to edit. Then Enter value, like "2004", press left \
arrow and continue with month, etc. 4. "Finally, the Kexi form editor is \
impractical.Although users can put wonderful forms together with just a few mouse \
clicks, there is no way to specify a data source for the individual fields, let alone \
use the form to enter data." It's working. To know it's working is at least as simple \
as to look as screenshots: http://www.kexi-project.org/screenshots.htmlJust use it as \
you're using MS Access: click on your form's surfacte, locate "data source" property \
in your property pane, enter table name; then click on a text field, and enter field \
name as it's "data source" property value. Switch to "data view". Done. The Forms \
module was already mature for 0.9 so what you can complain about is usability of some \
it's features, whose were not easy to discover for database newbies. Good news, it's \
all constantly improving. 5. "Neither Kugar nor Kexi are really integrated into \
KOffice: KWord uses its own database format, and it is impossible to create reports \
or forms using one of the three main KOffice components." It's true, and already \
answered on the koffice-devel list that the task has lower priority than core Kexi \
features. Most things, like CSV import/export, will be most probably developed in \
parallel to other tasks.

Having said that, hoping for future collaborationbest regards,
  Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska  Kexi Developer:      \
http://www.kexi-project.org | http://koffice.org/kexi  KDE3, KDE4 libraries for \
developing MS Windows applications:      \
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDElibs+for+win32 \
_______________________________________________koffice-devel mailing \
listkoffice-devel@kde.orghttps://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel


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