New to LibreOffice Databases - Forms, Checkbox, and Fields

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#1

I’m relatively new to LibreOffice Databases, and one of the things I’m looking to do with a form is this:

  • have a series of checkboxes in the form
  • each selected checkbox will append a string to the field in order

This is for a card game design, where the checkboxes would be things like ‘action types’ (e.g. offensive, defensive, counter, etc) so that a single card entry could have a field which was “Offensive Defensive” or “Defensive Counter” or “Offensive Counter” rather than having a version of “Offensive TRUE, Defensive TRUE, Counter FALSE, etc”.

Is it possible to do that relatively easily or am I just wishing upon stars and way too much ‘coding in the guts’?

#2

There is no such thing as a “LibreOffice database”. You may use embedded HSQL, embedded Firebird, good ol’ dBase or any kind of database engine accessible through some ODBC or JDBC driver.
Available options depend on the actually used database engine. See status bar of your Base document.

Yes, because you are thinking from the wrong end.
What you describe sounds like a many-to-many relation. First, you need to implement this relation in three database tables, say “Items”, “Properties” and “Items_Properties” mapping items to properties. Then there is one recipe to create a form mapping properties to items and vice versa.
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/download/file.php?id=11250 (relation between persons and tools where each person can have many tools and each tool can be property of many persons).

#3

It’s okay, the answer seems to be “No you can’t make checkboxes append fixed strings into a single larger string”, and I guess I’ll just have to do it manually.

#4

There is a well established method able to map your items to item properties. Once you have implemented this method, the right database engine** offers a function GROUP_CONCAT which calculates the concatenated property names for each item.
** unfortunately not embedded HSQL

Joe Cherry
Bob Apple
Joe Pear
Bob Avocado
Joe Apple

SELECT "Person Name", GROUP_CONCAT("Fruit Name" ORDER BY "Fruit Name") 
FROM "Table" 
GROUP BY "Person Name"

returns:
Bob Apple,Avocato
Joe Apple,Cherry,Pear

P.S. found a sample database with embedded Firebird having 2 queries utilizing GROUP_CONCAT. In Firebird, the function is called LIST:
relations2listboxes_FB.odb (62.3 KB)

#5

Simple form “Attacks” with 3 check boxes and result text box… no tables… one simple macro placed in the ‘on status changed’ event of each check box ‘control property’
Attacks.odb (12.3 KB)

Hope this helps!
Let me know if you want this form to do anything else, besides making you ultra wealthy! How about saving the selected data to a record in a table?

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