Comments on Roland Bouman's blog: MySQL meets OpenOffice.org

Hi William Anthony,can you tell me a bit more abou...

2008-06-28T10:32:00.000+02:00

Hi William Anthony,

can you tell me a bit more about your report generator?

Is it essential to build it in a desktop office environment, or is that merely a development platform you find convenient?

Your article might be a solution to everyone that ...

2008-06-28T07:21:00.000+02:00

Your article might be a solution to everyone that want to migrate to non-MS application like me.

Currently, I'm using MS Excel with MySQL ODBC Connector and VBA to create automated report generator.

Too bad, VBA support in OO still in development.

thx for your tutorial~ it's very userful for me......

2008-04-02T05:24:00.000+02:00

thx for your tutorial~ it's very userful for me...
thx agine ! :)

Adam, can you send me an email with the Open Offic...

2008-03-24T11:18:00.000+01:00

Adam, can you send me an email with the Open Office Options/Java/Classpath dialog?

Can you also pls try and put the connector in a shallow path without spaces, like C:\temp\mysql-connector-java-xxx.jar

and try again?

Oh and yes I did register it in Open OfficeAdam

2008-03-24T01:30:00.000+01:00

Oh and yes I did register it in Open Office

Adam

Roland By step 3 I mean the third page of the wiza...

2008-03-24T01:29:00.000+01:00

Roland

By step 3 I mean the third page of the wizard where the Test connection button is.

The mysql connector/J jar file is located at C:\Program Files\Java\
MySqlConnector\mysql-connector-java-5.0.8

Thanks

Adam

Hi Adam, I am not entirely sure which step you are...

2008-03-23T16:56:00.000+01:00

Hi Adam,

I am not entirely sure which step you are referring to exactly - the steps are not numbered in my post, but you refer to "step 3"

What's the location of your mysql connector/J jar file?

Did you register it in Open Office?

RolandI cant get past step 3 on the wizard when I ...

2008-03-23T01:32:00.000+01:00

Roland

I cant get past step 3 on the wizard when I hit Test Class I get JDBC Driver could not be loaded but I have followed your instructions meticuously. Any Ideas

Thanks

Adam

Maybe the problem is, that I need ODBC driver inst...

2008-03-11T15:45:00.000+01:00

Maybe the problem is, that I need ODBC driver instead of the JDBC driver? I don't think I have the ODBC driver installed.

Or, is the mysql-connector-java-5.0.8 driver the same as the ODBC driver? I do have the sql-connector-java-5.0.8 driver; I set up OpenOffice to point to that one as I did for the JDBC Driver.

I entered in localhost for server URL in Calc - af...

2008-03-11T15:22:00.000+01:00

I entered in localhost for server URL in Calc - after I ran that command in Terminal that is (for the second case).

Hi there,I connected in two ways. First way was t...

2008-03-11T15:20:00.000+01:00

Hi there,

I connected in two ways. First way was to go to File>New Database, and then go through the dialog boxes, I chose connect to a new database, chose MySQL, then selected JDBC, then entered in the database name, then the server URL, left it at port 3306, left the com.mysql.jdbc.Driver default as is, then entered in the user name of the database and then clicked finish. I also click the test connection button and it tested OK.

Second way was the same except I entered in localhost, after I issued the command ssh -L 3307:localhost:3306 username@myservername.net so that I could get an ssh tunnel for secure connections to database.

I have the same problem in both scenarios. In both cases, I had to disable SELinux because OpenOffice won't run with SELinux enabled.

Hi Anonymous,I asked about the jvm because I had b...

2008-03-10T13:19:00.000+01:00

Hi Anonymous,

I asked about the jvm because I had bad experiences with the jvm included by default in my distro. I use the sun JVM as well, so that should be ok.

I just created and registered a new db pointing to my local MySQL and I created a 16000+ row, 18 column view in there to test.

I am not really sure in what OOo view you are looking, but inside Calc, I can scroll pretty comfortable through the entire set, provided I scroll once to the far end (using the last button in the "Data Sources" view)
I am also not experiencing the freezing up you mentioned.

Importing the data into Calc does take a little while, but not more than half a minute.

May be I am not looking in the right view. Can you please describe in detail how you hooked up Cacl and MySQL? Personally i haven't really spotted something in Calc to "link" to the data rather than import it, maybe you have found a way that I am not noticing?

kind regardsa,

Roland

Hi,I am using the jre1.6.0_05 32 bit version for L...

2008-03-10T13:00:00.000+01:00

Hi,

I am using the jre1.6.0_05 32 bit version for Linux.

Hi Anonymous,What jvm are you using?

2008-03-10T08:50:00.000+01:00

Hi Anonymous,

What jvm are you using?

Hi there,Using your instructions, I was finally ab...

2008-03-10T02:18:00.000+01:00

Hi there,

Using your instructions, I was finally able to get OpenOffice 2.3 Calc to connect from my Centos 5.1 desktop machine to my remote MySQL database, also a Centos Linux 5.1 Box.

The problem I am having, is that when I open up a large table with 400 rows and maybe 25 columns in it (a table for products in an on line shopping cart), the scroll bars move down the table extremely slowly, and after a minute or two the table freezes up, as does OpenOffice, and I end up having to CtlAltDel and restart Open office again.

From a different desktop machine running Windows 2000, I am able to connect to the very same database using Navicat and I don't have this problem, I can scroll through and edit data very fast with no crashing.

Any suggestions as to what I can do to solve this problem? I'd like to start using Linux exclusively if I can get OpenOffice 2.3 to work without crashing. Maybe I just don't have my Linux desktop and or openoffice configured corectly?

wow.. an answer so quickly.. thank you! I googled ...

2008-02-08T07:57:00.000+01:00

wow.. an answer so quickly.. thank you!

I googled extensively, using every perm. of openoffice base rand and a fwe other terms.. and came up essentially with only that doc page saying that indeed HSql does have rand() in it. ..all the more frustrating then to have it act just like it doesnt.. hehe

You found an interesting solution with the alias. I kinda figured that using a call to an outside language like that would work, but Ive never had necessity to do it. Also saw another solution for Base that specifically used a macro to similar effect.

..yours is much better.

Anyway.. thanks for the ideas.

Hi David b,thanks for the comment! I appreciate it...

2008-02-08T00:39:00.000+01:00

Hi David b,

thanks for the comment! I appreciate it a lot.

I just googled a bit and it turns out you should be able to do this semi-natively in HSQLDB:

CREATE ALIAS RAND FOR "java.lang.Math.random"

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

Interestingly, the syntax docs say it should be a built-in:

http://hsqldb.org/doc/guide/ch09.html#N1251E

another use for this took me long while to ferret ...

2008-02-08T00:01:00.000+01:00

another use for this took me long while to ferret out. The default Hsql? engine in base doesnt have rand(). This creates a random number for you.

Failure after failure in trying to randomize some database with what I thoght was valid SQL. So I ran through most of this tutorial on setting up the environment.. and POOF it worked just great.

So if you want the environment you're more familiar with, this is a great way to get it.

Remi, When try it with calc in ooo 2.3.1, I cannot...

2008-02-01T21:35:00.000+01:00

Remi,

When try it with calc in ooo 2.3.1, I cannot simply close the dialog and leave calc open - it wants to restart open office.

I am running it on Kubuntu Gutsy. What's your OS?

Hi there! Yeah - it sounds like a bug anyway. Unfo...

2008-02-01T21:16:00.000+01:00

Hi there!

Yeah - it sounds like a bug anyway. Unfortunately I don't know where to get older versions of OOo.

I guess I would join one of the open office IRC channels on freenode and ask there if somebody knows something.

Good Luck!

Hello Roland,Your article seems to be what I was l...

2008-02-01T19:47:00.000+01:00

Hello Roland,

Your article seems to be what I was looking for..

But I'm having a problem... when I add the JRE with the class path in the Java options by scalc, everything seems to be ok. But when I close the options, leave scalc open, and reopen the options, the ''use a JRE'' checkbox is unchecked and there's no more JRE in the window. I work with the following versions: windows XP, jdk1.6.0_04 and Open office 2.3.1 (latest versions...). I suspect a bug in OOo and would like to try with an older version. Do you have an idea of my problem? Do you know where I could get an older version of OOo? I have tried with different versions of Java but they always disappear anyway...

thanks you very much,
Remi

Excellent : used to do this between MS Access & My...

2007-11-22T07:42:00.000+01:00

Excellent : used to do this between MS Access & MySQL with MySQL ODBC, but request admin rights to install MySQL ODBC driver.

With OpenOffice and JDBC you can freely do this : PortableOpenOffice (http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable) you can install Base in your home or USB key, all the same with JDBC jar file.

Only trick is for the JRE : need to install somewhere you've admin rights, then copy the location given at install time on your USB disk/key : in OpenOffice when requested to select Java options, you just select Add button and point to your JRE location, and it works.

Thanks for sharing Roland !

This is a very informative article and I have to s...

2007-11-11T07:07:00.000+01:00

This is a very informative article and I have to say cudos to those of you who assist those who know not such as myself, I have yet to try to connect open office to mysql however I was wondering how I would go about it and I believe you have answered my questions. Thank you very much for the time you donated to assist me. "perhaps not personally but you did have to donate your time to this article and I wish to show my appreciation"

Thank you!I got exactly what I needed from this ar...

2007-06-26T21:53:00.000+02:00

Thank you!
I got exactly what I needed from this article!

Roland;If it weren't for your kind offering in thi...

2007-06-24T19:40:00.000+02:00

Roland;

If it weren't for your kind offering in this tutorial, I would have never set this up correctly. Thanks a million.

Wayne Bjorken