[Kexi] Kexi performing calculations inside

[Jarosław Staniek]

Jeremy Davis said the following, On 2006-11-07 18:39:

> Does Kexi actually perform calculations, or do you still have to
> import, etc. to a spreadsheet for this functionality? I'm trying to
> create an item price list, which is based on the item cost, and a
> multiplier or markup. Eventually, I want to create a task list or flat
> rate price list, which contains a single task to perform, containing a
> labor item, product item, time spent on the task, etc. so that a
> customer can just look and see what a particular task price is (e.g.,
> install a thermostat, which includes labor to perform task, part,
> service call fee or trip charge to customer's site, etc.). I'm new to
> databases, as I've always used a spreadsheet file for this. The only
> info I've found so far is in this message
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kexi&m=115813730931274&w=2 which discusses it
> somewhat. 

Jeremy,
Thinking about calculations, the Query Designer comes to our mind first. 
Calculations are not yet supported there. There are two cases for calculations 
within queries:
Feature 1. Aggregate functions, i.e. totals for a given set of rows, e.g. 
"show me the average salary for each country". It's related to groupping 
that's not supported yet as well.
Feature 2. Calculations within query columns, i.e. based on one or more fields 
of the same row (record). Example: "show me the price for the products":
"SELECT price*value_added_tax, productname FROM products"

Both features can be combined of course. Support for Feature 2. is planned for 
Kexi 1.1.2 scheduled for January 10, 2007 [1]. Feature 1. is planned for Kexi 
2.0 version, to be available within about one year (unless someone comes with 
a significant support of any kind).
For Kexi 2.x there may be totals available also as an additional column 
available in the Table and Form View, so you could see the "live" total 
displayed in one place as you'd use a spreadsheet.

What's the current solution?

As you said - copying tabular data to the the clipboard and pasting to 
spreadsheets (not very extremely convenient but powerful) or using scripts.

Sebastian Sauer wrote many example scripts and may be able to demonstrate 
calculations performed by reading row by row in a (relatively short) script.
Sebastian, could you show something?

[1] http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/koffice-1.6-release-plan.html

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice: http://www.kexi-project.org, http://www.koffice.org
  KDE3 & KDE4 Libraries for MS Windows: http://kdelibs.com, http://www.kde.org