[Gambas-user] Quicky app

[Rob]

On Sunday 24 June 2007, Scott Castaline wrote:
> db Base. Is it possible to create the forms in Gambas and then the
> reports in OOo? 

Possible, but there's no premade Gambas component to generate the 
OpenOffice reports for printing yet.  You'd have to generate your own 
XML file, zip it up into a .odt and print by shelling out to 
OpenOffice.  

And at that point you might as well just use Gambas' built-in Printer 
object, which is actually pretty easy to deal with but not a 
full-blown report generator.  (Or try your luck with the recent 
development versions which include the gb.report component, but I 
personally would not use the development series for applications that 
were critical to my business until the stable 2.0 is released.)

> Also I presume I create the db in MySQL first, 
> (tables and relations etc) then in Gambas create the connection and
> forms? 

Gambas actually has a database manager if you'd rather do it all from 
within Gambas, but sure, you can create the DB in MySQL and set 
everything up before going into Gambas if you like.

> How about Queries? Can I do that in Gambas? Queries 
> generally use forms for the UI, correct?

I'm not sure what you're asking here.  Queries work fine in Gambas, 
but queries are just commands sent to the database engine to change 
data or retrieve rows for displaying.  For example, "select * from 
customers where zip = '12065';" is a query.  Did you see an example 
of a query somewhere else that you're hoping to duplicate in Gambas, 
and if so, can you share it?

Everything you've described so far is going to require some coding, 
btw.  I don't know if there are any "data entry and reporting" 
packages for Linux that require no coding in the way that Foxpro or 
Access required no coding for simple data entry tasks.  But even 
Foxpro couldn't do parent and child forms without any coding, at 
least when I used it (not sure about MS Access, since all the Access 
projects I worked on involved lots of code.)  

And Gambas is more analogous to Visual Basic than one of those 
database environments; there's no "data wizard" to automatically 
generate a form that retrieves, edits and saves data from a table 
yet, for example, though there are some data-bound controls in the 
development version.

I certainly don't want to discourage you from trying Gambas, but I am 
worried that you might be expecting to not have to do much coding.  
Gambas is a language with a nice form designer and IDE, but it's 
still a programming language at heart.  

Rob