LibreOffice database becomes corrupted

Hello!

I’m writing my PhD thesis with LibreOffice. I have a bunch of bibliography entries in the bibliography database. It used to work just fine, although I did have some trouble when switching from OpenOffice to LibreOffice.

Last Friday, I updated my Kubuntu to 12.04. I don’t know if it’s related, but I’d say the problem I now have is less than a week old. Here’s the problem:

Now, if I open the database (in Writer: Tools->Bibliography Database), most of my entries are corrupted. The identifier is still fine, as are any numerical values (page numbers, dates…)
All the text values show as either “english” or “A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2 for Windows and Linux”. It’s not always the same either. Right now they’re all “A Conceptual Guide…”. Earlier today they were mostly “english”. And before that it was “Staroffice 7”.
However, if I update all fields in my writer document (or even just the Bibliography table), the bibliography, which uses most of the entries in the database, is still fine, correctly displaying authors, journal names and so on.

I did a backup of all the files found in ~/.libreoffice/3/user/database, just in case I mess up anything.

It looks like the database software doesn’t know how to read the file anymore. I’m worried about adding any new entry, wondering whether it will save over all the other entries, and I will have to re-enter all 100+ entries (I believe it did that when I came over from OpenOffice).

I’d love to hear of a solution for that.

Thank you!

Hi @Katz1, if you’re still experiencing data corruption problems, please file a bug about this problem! The QA team will be more than happy to test out a data-corruption bug. We want to make sure that your data is safe! Thanks for your help!

I cannot advise you. Maybe Writer contains its own database functions for the bibliography.

I came here looking for an explanation as to why UBUNTU 12.04 doesn’t start with LibreOffice Base installed, and why, when I installed and launched Base, the system displayed a big red error message saying Base would not work in this version of Linux.

Then, I went to the package manager and installed openoffice.org. That happened VERY fast. Afterward, I tried launching BASE, and it WORKED (no error message)! Naturally, I suspect that I cannot trust it.

Maybe the developers have some kind of test database and application for evaluating proper function of base… I’ll proceed with caution.

My transition from Windows to Ubuntu has not gone as smoothly as I would like either.