Anybody use Base?

[Alex]

Anybody here familiar with Base, the database component of Open Office?

I had a small task that I thought I'd try doing in a database rather than my standard practice of just bruting it in Excel. So I tried setting it up in Base since I have that and have never played with it.

For some reason, a date field I have automatically changes to 1/1/1800 any date I enter that is prior to that. So 6/5/1756 becomes 1/1/1800.

But only when doing data entry through a form. When I do it directly in a table it is saved correctly (though still appears as 1/1/1800 in the form view).

Anybody use and have thoughts? I can find zero help on this online so I'm sure it is something really stupid I'm doing.

[JWBear]

"All your Base belong to us."








(Well... Someone had to say it!)

[Ghoulish Delight]

I found one message board in French that made reference to Base and 1/1/1800. Based on the Google translation, I don't think it's the same issue, but it wasn't quite clear. The only suggestion I could make out from it that might was to change the date format to yyyy-mm-dd before going to form view. Again, I don't think it's the same thing as the OP was talking about an error message "value 0000-00-00 cannot be represented as java.sql.Date" and you don't seem to be seeing that error.

ETA: Hmm, further reading on that board seems to indicate that "1/1/1800" might mean it thinks it's looking at a value of "null" for a date. The 0000-00-00 and error message seem specific to converting from sql to base, but the "solution" seems to be to tell base to read "0000-00-00" (and otherwise invalid date value in base) as a NULL, which it then displays as 1/1/1800. No idea if any of that helps your situation though.

Here's the link I'm gleaning this from.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://user.services.openoffice.org/fr/forum/viewtopic.php%3Ff%3D9%26t%3D17296&ei=WCVdS8OxMZDYsQOY5t3yCQ&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CA8Q7gEwAQ&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dbase%2Bopen%2Boffice:%2B%25221/1/1800%2522%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26rlz%3D1B3GGGL_e nUS347US348

[Ghoulish Delight]

Oh hey, you gave an example date of 1756. Was that just an example, or are the dates you're working with all before 1800? Because it seems that JDBC represents dates as offsets from 1/1/1800.

[Alex]

It is only dates from before 1/1/1800 that get converted.

But surely there must be some way to do a database of things older than that. And I can't find anything that even mentions these dates being changed.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Aha. Set the field type to "date" in the table, instead of numeric with date formatting.

source (http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=24754)

[Tref]

I'm more of a mineral face powder man myself.

[RStar]

Oh. You don't mean free base.

Then no, I have not used it.

[Alex]

Aha. Set the field type to "date" in the table, instead of numeric with date formatting.

source (http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=24754)

Thank you! That was completely not the problem!

But it did point me to a settings menu I had not found (Open Office help sucks) and I did find a setting in there that was causing the problem. Why the default for a date form field would not be to just accept any date I have no idea.

Thanks very much for looking into it. Your searching was better than mine.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Thank you! That was completely not the problem!
Always glad to help


Thanks very much for looking into it. Your searching was better than mine.
"open office" form date 1800

[Alex]

I was doing similar searches (and found plenty of threads on that forum). Oh well.