Autonumber - Why I hate Libre Office

English
#1

There’s a major glitch in the autonumber feature of the latest release. This is TERRIBLE!!! The numbering keeps skipping sequences. If I have a field that is a required field, and I accidentally tab past it before saving the record, the error message causes the autonumber feature to increment. Once I correct the error, the skipped rows equal the number of times I got the error warning on a required field. I intentionally made the error and counted the number of times this happened.

GARBAGE!!! This is why I won’t switch from MS Office to Libre Office. It’s not a reliable product. I would even be willing to pay for it if it was worth it, but it’s not.

UPDATE: Absolute crap. I have to abandon Libre Office. This is total garbage.

#2

Here also: Which database do you use?

#3

I’m using HSQLDB. In the other case, I had connected to an Access 2007 database.

#4

For me the topic is nothing but a nuisance. And on a general level autoincrement is something to get a unique key without effort. IMHO one should usually avoid assumptions on the value of the autoincremented key.

2 Likes
#5

@gshockxcc : You are right. There is something going wrong with internal HSQLDB and Autovalue. Same with internal Firebird and Autovalue. If I set field to required fields and won’t add content there appears and error, but value for autoincrement will be counted. So I will get different values, but it will look like 1, 3, 6, 11 …
This behavior won’t appear if you use a form and set the field in the form to entry required. Then the data will only be send to the database if required field are filled with content.
Behavior in MariaDB direct connection seem to be a little bit different. There will be added an empty text if varchar field is set to required, will add a default date ‘0000-00-00’. So no error message appears, a value is written and the autoincremented value will work as expected.

I would prefer to get it working with forms …

#6

Thank you for confirming. That proves my suspicions. Yes, your experience is exactly what I found, 1, 3, 6, etc.

I am still learning forms and trying to make them functional and connect them to my table. I may try that route.

I have found a workaround to populate the data in my table by closing the table, editing it, changing Autonumber for Yes to No, save, close, reopen, and change back from No to Yes. It’s not ideal, but it works.

#7

@gshockxcc If you found a bug please report it at the bug tracker. The contributers regularily solve open tickets but of course they need to be reported there first.

Software doesn’t get better by hating it but by reporting bugs, missing features, crashes, etc. If you have programming knowledge you can even help to improve Libreoffice yourself.

#8

I would be glad to help, but my programming knowledge (lack thereof) on this topic is probably not useful.

Bug report submitted.

1 Like
#9

Thanks!

For reference (for other readers of this thread): Here’s the bug report: Autonumber indexing error on required fields

#10

This behavior of autoincremented values might be a problem, which couldn’t be solved by Base. Setting a field to “Entry required” is saved in the database, if this is set (right) in the table. So Base sends the data to the database and gets the error back: There is no entry. The database sends this error while it tries to insert data. So it asks for a new (autoincremented) value. It gets the autoincremented value and after this action it will get the error.

Have a look at MariaDB: With direct driver it sets (not defined) default values. Think it is better to get the behavior of HSQLDB and Firebird than that of MariaDB with internal driver. When trying withg JDBC-driver for MariaDB it will work well. Incremented value will only be asked for if all values for the table are there.

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.