LibreOffice Base: Database Form is not responding

[EasyTrieve]

When I open a database that isn’t simple, I get this warning. Is there any way to adjust this warning message so that it doesn’t appear so quickly? A number of my databases just don’t open that quickly and it becomes an annoying message.

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*(Please excuse this personal note: Hi Ratslinger,

Little by little I got past some of the life challenges I was having that took me temporarily away from ASK and LO.

Recently I finally upgraded my LO from 5.4 to 7.x. Had to, as Debian Bookworm seemed to break LO5. So I’ve been busy working around a number of issues to get my lookup macros working again.

In particular, someone broke things in v6.x that made it not allow question marks in SQL field names, e.g. a field named `ok?`, or at least you can have them, but oSQL.setString(1,Text$) gets confused by them. (Really setString got broken).

Also setString gets confused by SQL that comes after a SQL GUI edit which renames fields as [name], rather than `name`. That one took me a day to figure out.

Hope you are fine. You still seem to be as sharp as a tack!

– Howard)*

[RobertG]

Never seen such a warning here. But it looks like warnings on a very slow laptop, where I installed Ubuntu 22.04. When starting LO there appears very often the message “Not responding” and then LO opens. Message comes from Ubuntu there not, from LO.

Which system do you use?

[EasyTrieve]

@RobertG, I’m computing some big indexes before the form can load (i.e. display and come alive). I have a home made lookup macro used with a combo box to select records from a list. I often have many different lookup combo boxes to allow searching for records different ways, and although it just takes a moment to compute all of these indexes, unfortunately some engineer who added this new not responding ‘feature’, probably thinking he or she was doing a great thing, didn’t really allow for such things.

But don’t worry about it. I hope to resume my c++ LO code efforts this winter and at some point think I can take this line out of LO, or at least for myself.

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(btw, … this summer I constructed and just brought online a home hybrid solar electric system so I’m now powered 99% by the sun during the day and use lithium iron phosphate batteries at night. I think these little soffice challenges are tiny compared to global co2 buildup crisis. So that work had to come first.)

LibreOffice base and calc were used heavily to process my past electrical usage data from my electrical company to be able to estimate how to size the various parts of this system!

[Villeroy]

Is this embedded HSQL? Extract it from the database document and use a HSQL driver 2.4.
[Python] Macro to extract and reconnect embedded HSQLDB

[EasyTrieve]

using mariadb

[RobertG]

Which connector do you use? Direct connection, JDBC ode ODBC?

[EasyTrieve]

Database type: MYSQL (JDBC)

[RobertG]

I would try the direct connection.
Tested this in the past: Table with 15 columns, 30000 rows. Opening table and scrolling down to the last row. Internal HSQLDB and MariaDB connected by JDBC need 30 seconds. Internal Firebird and MariaDB with direct connection (same server) need 1 second.

[EasyTrieve]

By ‘direct’ do you mean what LO calls a “Native” connection?

[RobertG]

Yes, native connection.

[EasyTrieve]

Many Base Features Don't Work in SQL Direct / Native Mode

When working with an external database such as MySQL, there are times when it is logical to Run SQL command directly, also known as Native SQL, also known as Analyze SQL command = no, also known as Escape Processing = False. Yeah, lots of terms for the same thing in Base. I’m not going to go into lengthy details to describe when it is a good idea to enable this mode, as that’s off topic. Here are some images for those who don’t know what I’m talking about. All these images show the same thing. I…

[RobertG]

It’s your decision. I have created many databases, also for MariaDB and PostgreSQL. Both could connect to LOBase with native connections, also with JDBC … OK, there are some bugs, which will need workarounds, but it’s the same with JDBC.

[EasyTrieve]

Thanks for the suggestion!

I tried native mode when I first got started with base but could not get past the brokenness of it. I wish I could say that something has been fixed since then but having submitted many base bug reports, and having watched over the years as they are not fixed, I know better. I believe native mode might have worked better in years past with OpenOffice and earlier versions of mysql, AND has the possibility of working much better and faster than java.

But the only connector I could ever get to reliability work with base and mariadb was jdbc. In fact I wrote up the instructions here at Ask for how to use these two together.

[Villeroy]

In direct (non-native) mode you lose the connections between forms and subforms.
Wokaround: SELECT * FROM native_query stored as parsed query.

[mikekaganski]

I am sorry, and I am not really familiar with Base; but it seems to me, that there is a confusion between the “direct / native connector” and “direct / native SQL mode”, which are basically unrelated?

[Villeroy]

Indeed, I referred to the query modes because the above hyperlink pointing to Many Base Features Don't Work in SQL Direct / Native Mode.
This topic was about the different drivers SDBC, ODBC and JDBC. SDBC is “native” to LibreOffice, typically installed by office extension and useless with frontends other than LibreOffice.

[RobertG]

Native connector to MariaDB is included in LO since LO-Version 6.2. So no need for looking for an extension.

There are native connectors included for PostgreSQL, MariaDB (or older MySQL) and Firebird. All this native connectors could connect to a server and are more faster than JDBC-connections.

[Villeroy]

Nevertheless, “direct SQL mode” is worth trying when something like the OP’s error message appears on screen. Quite often, direct mode delivers more descriptive error messages.