I recently moved my Linux Mint 17.2 over to KDE and have just discovered kexi.
I presently use LibreOffice Base for a collection database and am interested in moving over to kexi. (I like the SQLite approach - no embedded/split and frontend/backend considerations).
This could get into 100,000 plus records, each with up to 4 images (each one about 200KB jpegs). Before I dig much further, is kexi suitable for this?
How is portability handled? Put my collection.kexi plus all the image files in one folder?
I have studied it quite a bit already but maybe I am missing something in field properties in a form. How do I get
comma separated numbers - e.g.1,000,000
currency entries - e.g. $10.50 in my case ( I just want to enter 10.5)?
image to fill the form object box. I have scaled contents set to yes but don't understand the Size Policy choices

Conker wrote:I recently moved my Linux Mint 17.2 over to KDE and have just discovered kexi.
I presently use LibreOffice Base for a collection database and am interested in moving over to kexi. (I like the SQLite approach - no embedded/split and frontend/backend considerations).
This could get into 100,000 plus records, each with up to 4 images (each one about 200KB jpegs). Before I dig much further, is kexi suitable for this?
How is portability handled? Put my collection.kexi plus all the image files in one folder?
I have studied it quite a bit already but maybe I am missing something in field properties in a form. How do I get
comma separated numbers - e.g.1,000,000
currency entries - e.g. $10.50 in my case ( I just want to enter 10.5)?
image to fill the form object box. I have scaled contents set to yes but don't understand the Size Policy choices

Hi Conker,
Thanks for trying Kexi.

1. 100,000 of records is not a problem, there are users having 10 times more per table (actually 880,000 records fit on screen only, reported at https://bugs.kde.org/351702, we should fix it to remove this limit).

2. For now Kexi stores objects in its project's database, what has its own limits when large files or large number of files are inserted. It's safe to do that but not the best approach; for example compacting such database, useful if there were a few removals of data or images, will be inefficient as the entire database gets rewritten in the background. So yes, storing references to files (images) in a real folder is the way to go. Unfortunately not supported at the moment. This wish is known but I recommend reporting a wish officially at https://bugs.kde.org. We're planning to nicely cache thumbnail of images so the list of photos is displayed nearly "immediately" on screen.

To decide what open source features or fixes are implemented first, please visit https://www.bountysource.com/teams/kexi

3. Comma separated numbers or currency prefix could be set using a Format property but like the above feature this needs to be implemented in Kexi too, it would be great if you file a wish at bugs.kde.org too.

4. You have Visible Decimal Places property In Table designer for fields of floating-point type. See how it looks on my PC when I set it to "2" instead of "Auto":
.

As you see we have some support for international settings (coming from the system settings https://userbase.kde.org/System_Settings) in Kexi - ',' is used for decimal separator, while on an USA PC it's used for thousands separator.

5. Regarding scaling images, what's your Kexi version? I recommend 2.8 or 2.9. There are properties: Scaled Contents, Ver/Hor. Alignment, Keep Ration. Size Policy property is hidden in newer versions, it's not relevant anymore.

.

Thank you very much Jaroslaw for fast response.
I filed a bug report - Bug 355199 - Wishlist for referencing separate image files.
For the image size issue, I am on version 2.8.5, the latest available in both Mint Software Manager and Kubuntu/Backport. At this point I don't want to try building a 2.9 version
This is what I see in the Object Properties
http://imgur.com/bduv8Xx
I worked some more with kexi and its really good but that issue with maybe 200,000 embedded images is a serious one for me.
Thanks again for great support, Best regards, Conker

Thanks for the report.

For the record, your Kexi is 12 versions old, 2.8.5 is from Jul 5, 2014. I am sometimes thinking "are all these distributions suitable for everyday use" (to rephrase the forum's title) because surprisingly, it's easier to target Windows with fresh versions than Linux.

It could nice if you ping your distributor to make true backports of the software.

Or make a change

Well, after some months I try again with kexi.
1. No respose from my distro - Linux Mint KDE 17.3, which I want to stay with - regarding version (2.8.5) being now 15 versions behind current stable (2.9.11).
2. Therefore, even though it is outside of my experience, I attempt to compile 2.9.11 using https://community.kde.org/Calligra/Building/2.
3. It seems to go OK, even though I cannot watch my terminal for ~2hours (I did all of calligra).
4. When I launch kexi from my desktop app launcher, it is version 2.8.5! Other calligra modules are also 2.8.5.This was my previous version which I was very careful to remove before compilation attempt.
5. Sure enough, when I try to launch kexi executable from my build folder, /home/andy/calligra/calligra-2.9.11/build/kexi/ I get Unknown Error message.
6. My knowledge stops here presently but I like to learn. So if there are any obvious things to try, feedback would be much appreciated (which logs to study etc.?)
Thank you.