Hello community,

I'm trying to find new ways to work with Kexi.

As I told you in other post, I'm involved on an archaeological project, and between our activities, we are planning to support local researchers, giving to them historical databases. The document sources will be the local archives of our area of interest. We want to make pictures of every historical document stored in these archives. This activity involve describe documents using the international ISAD(G), and we would like to link this information to the document's images.

Since the project will be done in an undeveloped country, we are thinking to offer to the locals researchers a solution on free software, and we are testing if we can distribute the historical database in a DVD with OpenSuse, using Kexi as the DBMS.

The problem that we are having is to adjust the image of the documents to a image box in a form. I don't know if is possible to adjust automatically the image file to the size of the image box, or if is possible to move the image into the image box, or if I should better offer a link to open the image file, or pdf file, from another file stored outside of the database, to open it with an image viewer, or pdf viewer.

I would send the templates of this historical database, with a picture file of one historical document, to a better understanding of the problem that we are facing.

Pastor.

Hi,
You can resize contents of the image box form widget to the size of the box:

.

Also, you can add links to any address (local path or intranet/internet URL). But links cannot be constructed based on the image filename for example.
Images can be stored in the database only in the Kexi version you have access to. If you want an option to store images externally, which is recommended if the images are large and other programs have to easily access them, Kexi itself needs some modifications to your needs.

Hi,
What is your usage model?
Do you plan to have a central database? And the synchronise user databases from time to time?

Pictures could be stored in db itself,
up to some size - what is estimated number of pictures: 1K, 1M? what is estimated size of one picture?
and for synchronization there could be special script run (written) separately out side of kexi.
As Jarek wrote earlier

Today I'm afraid that kexi has no "Synchronization" mechanism.

If you use ex.: local postgresql as kexi database backend, then you may use some synchronization tool ex.: http://www.rubyrep.org/ - I haven't use it yet is only an idea.
One extra thing that you will get by this approach is application update, since all definitions of forms and reports are also stored in database.
If you update form in your central database on update/synchronization you will also get new form in local database - think of who can do that.

Just a bunch of ideas.

Hello Mr. Staniek,

Thank you for your answer. It works. Ideally, the model to follow would be like the web page of the Spanish Archives:

http://pares.mcu.es/

The fact is that you can adjust the picture file to the image box, but the image box only offer an static image, and you can't resize in order to read better the document. I think that if Kexi could resize the images, like every image viewer can do, it would be a more powerful tool to the historical research.

I will answer to your tips in a next post, because I'm going today to the project, and I have to do my suitcases.

Thank you again!

Pastor.

@pastorgomez You can bind the very same image box to a data source in your table or query. It does not have to be static. Kexi is database oriented, if any element can be bound to data source, we're trying to make it possible for users, ideally without any programming.

External source for images is a nice idea, and can be added on request. That would be similar feature to the Web Browser widget's URLs that can be fetched from table or query:



(of course Image Box would not need the web browser component so would stay extremely fast)

By the way, maybe you could try the web browser form widget and display web pages with photos?