Author Topic: Good database for c750  (Read 11218 times)

chroafjd

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« Reply #15 on: April 29, 2004, 09:57:08 am »
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Jeremy,

I love portabase. Thanks!

Quick question: Are there any plans in the works to enable both screen views possible on the 7XX units?

That\'s the only real thing lacking for me right now.

Cheers.


I tried to install the latest vesion of Portabase - version 1.9 ? - on my C860 but it won\'t install. Currently  have Cacko Qtopia ROM on my machine, version 1.20. Any limitation with this OS. Which version of Portabase did you install?

Thanks in anticipation,
Ashu

jmbowman

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« Reply #16 on: April 29, 2004, 12:09:47 pm »
Regarding a file repository: Yes, ideally this would be a site where people could upload their own templates and data files.  It still would take time to find a place to host it, write or find software to handle uploads and file listings, write usage instructions, resolve technical problems, etc.  It\'s not necessarily a massive undertaking, but certainly complex enough to eat up a fair amount of time.

A WinCE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile 2003 port would actually require a pretty substantial amount of work.  I think Metakit (the underlying database library) runs on that platform, but Qt doesn\'t.  Thus any code dealing with the user interface, data structures, input/output, or text handling would have to be rewritten to use a different set of libraries; while this is potentially somewhat straightforward, it does mean rewriting pretty much the whole application.  I don\'t have a WinCE-based PDA and as a general policy try to avoid buying (or receiving) anything that results in money going to Microsoft, so I won\'t be doing such a port.  (I only did a regular Windows port because I have a couple of old Windows machines and friends with newer ones; I actually don\'t know anybody who owns a WinCE PDA.)  If somebody else wants to take a stab at it, I can answer questions about the code, though.

I don\'t suppose the Cacko ROM gives a more useful installation error message than the standard ROM does?  I will put together an ipk using the old postinst script in case it\'s the new sed lines causing the problems; I\'ll post a link to the package once it\'s ready (probably in the next day or so).

kenroy

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« Reply #17 on: May 03, 2004, 03:43:57 am »
Jeremy,

I think the last version that I was able to install without any problems was 1.7. I\'m willing to test installing using the old script if you want to put together a test package.

Thanks,
Kenroy
SL-A300 | Sharp ROM 1.50 J | Panasonic 256MB SD
-----------------------------------------------------------
SL-C860 | Sharp ROM 1.40 JP | Panasonic 1GB Pro High Speed SD | Buffalo WLI-CF-S11G | KWINS PHS CF card

chroafjd

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« Reply #18 on: May 03, 2004, 03:51:22 pm »
Folks, I have been trying to install Portabase on my C860 driven by Cacko ROM v1.20. No luck so far. Which version did you guys manage to install. Has someone got it working on a C7xx machine?

Thanks,
Ashu

PowerZ

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« Reply #19 on: May 03, 2004, 11:55:35 pm »
Ashu -

I have 1.9 working on a C750.
C-750 - Cacko ROM version 1.21b - Lexar 256MB SD card - Kingston 1 GB CF Card

SL - 5500 - Sharp ROM version 3.13 - SanDisk 128 Mb SD card - Mr. Flash 128 MB CF Card

Omicron

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« Reply #20 on: May 04, 2004, 12:57:51 am »
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I tried to install Portabase but it gave me a \'sorry something went wrong\' message. The application appeared in my app tab though but having tried it am not sure it is working, as it wont see any text files for import.


I might take a look at phpmyadmin though as I did get mysql working!

Thanks,

Mark


I loved portabase, but I encrypted some DBs and eveytime I added to them, they were no longer open-able (corrupted).  Submitted the bug to Portabase site, but got no reply...Happened on every single sl5500 I tried, but worked flawlessly on windos version.

Also, Portabse REALLY needs a basic record level syncing capability...even if it just add dups and leaves the user to sort it out.  That (non-syncing) and the bug encrtypting-adding via SL5500 were the reasons I had to drop the Portabse from my Z (or rather just make it read-only and update just my pc version).

Otherwise terrific program.
"You Shall Not Pass"    
....Gandalf, Lord Of The Rings
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C-860 (Cacko), 3x4gb MD  
DLINK 660W, 1GB SD,  
Upgraded Archos AV320 w/80GB HDD
Pocketop and Targus IR keyboards
Favorite Deal Site: SaveCity.net (pretty cool, good deals daily on one page)

jmbowman

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« Reply #21 on: May 04, 2004, 01:42:28 am »
I uploaded a zip file containing an ipk of version 1.9 (the version for newer ROMs) using the postinst script from version 1.7, you can get it here.  I confirmed that this installs correctly on my SL-C760 (original ROM, still in Japanese), but so did the package that other people are having trouble with.  If people still have trouble with this, could they please tell me:

- Which Zaurus model
- Which ROM
- Has a previous PortaBase version been installed on it since the last ROM flash (I\'m wondering if it only works when it doesn\'t need to update the mime.types file or something like that)

Omicron, are you referring to bug 888022?  I replied to it twice and then marked it closed for the stated reason (bug was fixed in version 1.8 to the best of my knowledge).  If that was you, the reason you didn\'t get an email reply is because it was posted anonymously; neither the SourceForge system nor I knew who to email a reply to.  My first response was posted one day after the bug report was opened, and I left the bug open for two months waiting to see if the poster would check up on it and reply...then closed it with a second comment, figuring I wasn\'t going to hear anything further about it.

And while I suppose syncing is a reasonable thing to want, I don\'t think anybody had actually requested it before...I know I don\'t see it on the SourceForge \"Feature Requests\" list or in the file I\'ve compiled from various requests via email and forums.  I might be able to do something like this if I change how internal row references are handled; I\'ll think about it and see if I can come up with something that could be implemented in the next release or two.

kenroy

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« Reply #22 on: May 04, 2004, 06:53:53 am »
Jeremy,

I removed all the pieces of the 1.9 that I installed before and tried this installer on the C860. Installation failed once again when I tried installing to the SD card. It partially failed when I installed to internal memory...I got a dialog saying that there was a problem and that the application may or may not work (it was in Japanese so my interpretation of the message may be questionable). After quitting the installer the PortaBase icon was visible and the application seemed to run fine. It didn\'t show up in the package installer however and I had to manually remove the app before trying another install.

I thought I\'d try editing the mime.types file and found that the latest version available on SourceForge installs properly if I remove two lines from the /home/QtPalmtop/etc/mime.types file:

application/portabase    pob
csv/csv        csv

It looks like the post install script chokes on the C860 if those two lines exist. I also notice that the mime type for csv files gets written as follows after the install:

text/x-csv        csv

I don\'t know which app wrote the csv/csv mime type (maybe Hancom Sheet?) but that would appear to be the cause of the problem.


-Kenroy
SL-A300 | Sharp ROM 1.50 J | Panasonic 256MB SD
-----------------------------------------------------------
SL-C860 | Sharp ROM 1.40 JP | Panasonic 1GB Pro High Speed SD | Buffalo WLI-CF-S11G | KWINS PHS CF card

jmbowman

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« Reply #23 on: May 08, 2004, 04:47:22 pm »
Yup, this would be a problem.  The code in the postinst script for registering MIME types came from the \"qtopia-addmimetype\" script which is part of the standard Qtopia distribution but doesn\'t come installed on the Zaurus.  This script is designed to exit with an error if the extension of the MIME type being added is already claimed by another MIME type, which seems to be the case here.

The source of this problem is that there isn\'t an official MIME type for CSV files; I\'ve seen application/csv, csv/csv, text/comma-separated-value, text/csv, and text/x-csv used.  None of these are present in the default mime.types file of any Zaurus ROM I\'ve seen (including my SL-C760, which has Hancom Sheet pre-installed), and I didn\'t see any applications before PortaBase register it, so I had to just pick one.

Now it looks like another application (or some new ROM) has probably picked a different MIME type for the .csv extension; could somebody who has anything besides \"text/x-csv\" associated with this extension try to figure out which of the applications they\'ve installed registered it?  That check in the script is there because having an extension associated with multiple MIME types actually does cause problems.  I could change the script to just override any previous association, but that would probably break things for the application that put that association there.  So I\'d like to contact whoever did it and work things out...

fpp

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« Reply #24 on: May 08, 2004, 05:53:48 pm »
Hi Jeremy,

I would like to grab the opportunity to thank you for Portabase, it\'s a really neat and useful app ! Especially for a former Psion user like me, accustomed to having a light and fast database handy...

Also, I had no trouble installing 1.9 on a C760 recently reflashed with the Cacko Qtopia 1.21 ROM, the mime types were handled just fine.

Finally, a little question : in the 1.9 help file, its says that Views let you choose the columns to display, and also specify widths for these columns, but I can\'t figure out how to achieve the latter. Is this actually possible now, or is it a \"to-do\" feature ?

Thanks,
fred

jmbowman

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« Reply #25 on: May 08, 2004, 06:40:32 pm »
Setting column widths has been possible since version 1.0, but you don\'t do it by entering a pixel count; from the \"Data viewer\"-]\"Column labels\" subsection of the help file:

\"To change the widths of the columns in the current view, click on the border between two column labels (or the right edge of the last column) and drag it to the desired location.\"

I should probably add a reference to this in the \"View editor\" section of the help file as well; I\'ll add that in the next version.

fpp

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« Reply #26 on: May 09, 2004, 03:49:51 pm »
Ooooopssss... talk about  a brown-bag, egg-on-face question :-)
Sorry for reading through the help file too fast !
The funny thing is that of course I\'d tried this first, as that is the way it\'s usually done (in Windows etc.). But doing this with a stylus on a small screen takes some getting used to... so as my first couple of attempts were unsuccessful (sorting or stats instead), I\'d sort of decided things were different on the Z :-)
Thanks for the correction - now that I know it works, I\'ve gotten less clumsy, and in Hancom Sheet too !

chroafjd

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« Reply #27 on: May 10, 2004, 12:42:38 pm »
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Ashu -

I have 1.9 working on a C750.




I finally managed to install version 1.9 as well. The message displayed on the screen after the installation is misleading. It says \'something went wrong\', whereas the application had already been installed. I found it a couple of days later on my desktop accidentally.

Great piece of work jmbowman. However, I\'ve not been able to read rows of databases created in \'csv\' format into Portabase. It just doesn\'t find the csv-database on the Z.  This is my only hurdle at the moment. The \'csv database\' itself is fine because I can read it into other applications.

Thanks in anticipation of any contributions,
Ashu

gester

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« Reply #28 on: May 10, 2004, 01:06:08 pm »
Is is posable to write scripts to interface with portabase? something like perl\'s DBI, or the equivalent in python?  this would be great for people trying to make there database apps as platform independent as posable.

jmbowman

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« Reply #29 on: May 10, 2004, 08:39:57 pm »
chroafjd: I suspect you\'re having the problem outlined above; another application registered the \".csv\" extension with some MIME type other than text/x-csv, so the post-installation script returned an error.  I\'m not sure how the installer handles this (it may vary between ROMs), but at least in your case it seems to have left the files installed and just given you an error message.  Since the PortaBase MIME type was registered first, you can open PortaBase files normally.  But it failed to register \"text/x-csv\" (the very last part of the installation), so it can\'t find anything it recognizes as a CSV file.  Could you let me know what if anything you have for csv in /opt/QtPalmtop/etc/mime.types, and if possible a list of applications you\'ve installed?  It would be ideal if you could figure out which one did it, but even a list of likely candidates would help me track it down.

gester: There isn\'t a PortaBase-specific API for working with the data files yet, but you can manipulate them at a slightly lower level using the Metakit API; see the format documentation on the website for details on how the files are structured.  This works from C++, Python, and Tcl.  You can also export the file to XML or CSV (even from the command line as part of a script), manipulate that using standard XML or text processing tools, and then import the results back in as a new file.  Early on, I considered writing a Python library for working with PortaBase files in the same way the GUI does, but put that on the back burner after I finished XML import/export since I figured that was easier to work with for most people.  If there is interest in such a library, I can add it back to the TODO list; I probably won\'t get around to it for a few months, though.