Base Form editing gone wacko

[EasyTrieve]

New LO version for me; now trying to edit an old base form. But editor screen layout is really very messed up now.

Any way to fix it, short of rolling back to an older version of LO?

Here’s an editing screenshot showing badly overlapped controls, incorrectly placed pull down buttons, gray and white areas in wrong place, etc.:

And here is what the form actually looks like:

Version: 25.2.3.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 520(Build:2)
CPU threads: 16; OS: Linux 6.12; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Debian package version: 4:25.2.3-2+deb13u3
Calc: threaded

[RobertG]

I get the same bug here with LO 25.2.4.2. But when choosing LO 25.8.4.2 the bug has been gone. Have installed many different versions of LO parallel for testing.
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I would only use LibreOffice direct from LibreOffice packages - special with Base. There are too many differences between the packages of the Linux distributions and the one of LO directly.

[EasyTrieve]

Thank you for the good advise Robert! I’ll take it.

BTW, do you happen to have a script (bash) you use, and might share, to help make installing a given parallel version a bit easier?

But that’s for later. For now I’ll abandon Debian’s package version for LO version and hope that makes things better.

Thanks again. – Howard

[RobertG]

Installing parallel might help. I have a separate folder for alle LO-versions I have installed. In this folder are many sub folders like “LO2621”. In every sub folder exists a folder “install”.
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I download the 3 packages (program, language and help), extract it to the folder “LO2621” for example, move all *.rpm-files inside this extracted folders directly to “LO2621”. Then start konsole in folder “install” and run for i in ../*.rpm; do rpm2cpio $i | cpio -id; done. That’s all. LibreOffice could be started then from /install/opt/libreoffice25.2/program/soffice For your system it will be a special *.deb-command.

[EasyTrieve]

Ok. I did one: v26.2. And it appears to fix the editing problem I originally asked about. Thank you! (BTW I can see that what I downloaded from LO direct, came with Base, whereas the repo from Debian needed to have Base as a separate install.)

But do you worry that the commonly shared LO profile might be different and/or get corrupted when shared between a number of versions, or how do you deal with that issue? Isn’t the profile being shared between versions on your system? I’m referring to the instructions at Installing in parallel/Linux: Installing in parallel/Linux - The Document Foundation Wiki, which has a section titled: “Optional, but Recommended when Testing: Changing the User Profile location”. (And if separate profiles, then there is also an issue of getting Java/JDBC setup correctly on each.) Not criticizing, just curious.

… I discovered the hard way that you can’t simply use the latest JDBC connectors from MariadDB together with the latest Java version available from Debian. Rather you have to use a bit older version of DB connectors or else they won’t work together to open MariadDB.

[RobertG]

The user profile on my system works well with LO 7.4 and all other versions up to LO 26.2 So no problem to use the same profile for all, also for the version, which had been installed by OpenSUSE here. The OpenSUSE version I have uninstalled later because ReportBuilder didn’t work well there and Firebird didn’t work the same way as Firebird of original LO will work.
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For connecting to external databases I use the integrated direct connection (MariaDB and PostgreSQL). With this direct connections other people could see the same behavior on there system I see here. Nearly all Base files I have created I created for other people…
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With JDBC connectors you have to look for special connection strings. MariaDB Connector/J 3.0.0 and newer need ?permitMysqlScheme added to the database name:

[EasyTrieve]

Robert, I decided to get rid of the repo version from Debian and instead use the newer version installed directly from LO as you suggested. But I soon found that when I removed the repo version and installed the version from LibreOffice web site that the desktop menu files and icons were gone.

So to get them back, I re-installed the repo version from Debian and planned on using the desktop files and re-edit them to point to the newer LO version.

But before I did the editing of the .desktop files, I ran the repo version to get a little thing updated. Much to my surprise the Base editor worked like it used to! Not slow and clunky.

Then I checked editing a form, and it too didn’t have the strange format layout that I first reported here.

I was so surprised I had to slap myself and check the About | LibreOffice | Version information. And yes it was the version from the Debian repo that now worked perfectly. What gives? I have no idea. I guess it comes down to the old method of if in doubt, uninstall and re-install and sometimes this matters. – Howard

[skyandrews]

When editing the form, the type of “Anchor” used in each control’s properties will also affect how LO places each control on the form, sometimes making it “appear” scrambled. Try anchoring each control to page and use page measurements to place the controls relative to their page position. Also if a control is to hide another control, the hidden control must be “sent to back” and / or the visible control “to front” by using the control right click Arrange option, or using the control’s Visible property.

• The “old” page format will need to be duplicated in the new LO version before the form will display “like” the old one.

[EasyTrieve]

@Profile - skyandrews - Ask LibreOffice Thanks.

[RobertG]

Take the properties of the form controls:

[EasyTrieve]

In the shortcut menu I showed, when I select an option, To Paragraphs for instance, it changes what is found next to Anchor in the General tab for the form controls. So they are the same, and yet they are not. Because in the form controls you have 5 choices and in the menu I showed there are only 3. …??? what a mess I think. Another bug? Thanks Robert for pointing out that Anchor also appears in the form controls General tab. … But all this discussion doesn’t shed any light on the issue I originally raised, especially because it wasn’t solved by this, and even I find it would be very strange that this would have any effect on what I observed (see my first screen shot above when I first asked about this.) … I had hoped to someday get to where I could confront the c++ myself about such things, but I think I’m too old for that. I only hope someone who is younger can dig into the c++. I think the first thing is to read the code and put some comments into it. Those who wrote this code had a pretty good idea of what was what in it, but over the years that is forgotten, and because they left almost no comments in the code it makes it really very hard for a newcomer to figure out what is what, …especially with the huge amount of code that one has to deal with here. Thanks guys.

[RobertG]

In Writer the possibility to set anchor to page often doesn’t give the result the normal user expects. A anchor to a page is like fixing the image on a page of paper together with the page number. Many users are irritated from this behavior so this possibility isn’t shown by default. You could change this behaviors by Tools → Customize.