After years of failure for so many reasons, I was finally able to use my Evolution address book as a data source, thanks to Linux Antergos OS (Arch), and most likely the Evolution and LibreOffice developers (hard to tell where and when It happened, but it just worked all of a sudden, where no solution ever has)! (Put happy emoji here) Although it did screw up a little, but thankfully in a good way, because I could only choose one of the many tables that make up all of my address books, but it converted all of them to separate tables anyhow!??!?!, Good because I don’t have to do it for each one individually.
I see a lot of people here (everywhere) freaking out about not being able to edit the fields of their Evolution, Thunderbird and other address books from within LO. I was sort of tee’d off to it at first, but quickly realized that doing that is a bad Idea anyhow, because now you could be causing trouble for Evolution, and it has plenty of quirks of it’s own. It is a shared data source after all and it does belong to evolution not LO.
After setting up the Evolution address book as a data source, I now have 10 address books, but only need three to keep in sync with my database which is for my business only. None of the tables field names work with my naming conventions, and there are a bunch of unused and useless fields in there too that make navigating hard. There is no Primary key, and there is no working way to create one, and again; what would it do to Evolution? In reality it’s a freaking mess of very usable data in an unusable way, which I want in my DB, but not “as is”, soooooooooooo, the big question:
Is there a way to use the data source from within my database without even seeing it directly, like for instance: using my own tables with their own names, and fields with the names, values and formats I give them, taking the actual records from fields in the data source? Sort of using my tables in mydb.odb as a mask over the ones in the address book data source (addresses.odb), and still be able to work with and make changes to the records? I still need the functionality of managing the records within both Evolution and LO.
Evolution address books are not well suitable for relational data structuring, and don’t accommodate using value tables for Countries, Cities, zip codes… normalization etc., and they probably don’t have to, but I want maximum flexibility and productivity in my DB, as it’s much more than a mere address book (well it can and should be).