GSoC: Add support for importing tables from LibreOffice Base to Kexi [was: The results of your email commands]

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 18 February 2014 21:44, Jayesh Hathila <sharma.jayesh52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I am mailing to this mailing list as couldn't found any separate one for
> kexi.To start working on the idea of "Add support for importing tables from
> LibreOffice Base to Kexi "
>  I am going through the structure of .odb format and how I can extract data
> after unzipping (for now I went through its xml files).

Hello Jayesh,
Thanks for contacting us. It is great

(For others, Jayest is interested in this idea: )
[1] http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2014/Ideas#Project:_Add_support_for_importing_tables_from_LibreOffice_Base_to_Kexi

Jayesh,
Please note that the calendar of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is published at
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2014/help_page#2._What_is_the_program_timeline
Please read there how is the GSoC program organized.
It is OK to get more in-depth idea what is expected but by no means
this is good time for detailed design or development.
Before you start that, we expect good proposal, and you possibly
compete with other proposals for the same task.

> I wanted to know
> what I am doing is on right track or I am off track ? Means, do we have to
> extract the data from .odb structure and  convert to .mdt (which is
> currently supported by kexi) or do we have to add another option of .odb to
> kexi (though in both the situations I will have to read data of odb).
> Also it
> will be great if you can provide me with more resource from where I can have
> more idea about .odb structure .

I only published a link to the Base FAQ:
[2] https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/FAQ_%28Base%29

It's up to student to get and document knowledge about the format, map
it to Kexi's needs.
Sp it's good that you study the the odb format.

I do not know about .mdt format, so I suppose it's a mistake (where
did you hear about it in context of Kexi?).
Kexi's format is .kexi (file databases) and postgrsql/mysql for server
databases.
Other formats (maybe you meant .mdb?) are external that Kexi is only
capable importing into.

As I wrote at [1] the task is about implementing Migration from the
external format .odb to all 3 Kexi formats.
In fact these are different storage types for the same format.
Creating/modifying database project in the destination formats of Kexi
is possible using KexiDB APIs and should be only performed using these
APIs.
For reading external formats you do not use Kexi APIs but external
APIs. Example is the mdb -> Kexi migration, which uses the mdbtools
library for reading the mdb format, as mentioned at [1]. All the
migration drivers are located in the kexi/migration/ source code
directory.

Summing up, student that will be selected for this task will have to
be largely independent but also will receive support from me.
The resulting work will be used in real projects, so a proof of
concept solution won't be accepted, only a "nice enough" solution
supporting 80% features.

>From my side, I am ensuring the task is doable, the odb format can be
mapped to .kexi.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
 Qt for Tizen | http://qt-project.org/wiki/Tizen
 Qt Certified Specialist | http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek