[Kexi] working with "live" databases that are managed by other applications

[Tom Metro]

I use an Android app that stores its data in an SQLite3 database, and
the data gets backed up to my desktop, where I sometimes have a need to
browse the data. Rather than cobbling together queries, I figured I'd
revisit Kexi, which I last looked at briefly back when I was running
Ubuntu 9.10 and I put it aside due to the obsolete version available in
the repositories.

Now running Ubuntu 12.04 and Kexi 2.4.0, I figured I'd give it a spin
again, and see if it might be a quick way to build a GUI browser.

For this use case, I'd ideally like to be able to create a Kexi project
in a local project directory, where custom forms can be saved, and then
somehow specify that the actual database is at some other path, won't
contain any Kexi-specific metadata, and should be opened read-only.

This sounds a bit out of the ordinary, but if you substitute connecting
to a database on a remote database server instead of using a local file,
then the need to separate the project and metadata from the database
would be a common use case. One can imagine lots of situations where
someone might want to build a GUI to work with a database where the
schema is dictated by other applications or under the control of other
departments within a corporation.

The tutorials didn't hint at anything like that being possible. Is it
beyond Kexi's current capabilities?

I moved on to "plan b" for a temporary solution by pulling the database
into Kexi. I tried the two obvious things: 1. copying the database,
renaming it to have a .sqlite3 extension, and opening it in Kexi, and 2.
creating a new project and using the import feature.

For #1 it failed with the complaint that the file lacked the Kexi
metadata. For #2 I get a "this type is not supported" error. Kexi can't
import from a natively supported format?

The above experience seems to suggest that Kexi can't be used as a
general purpose database browser (without custom designed forms). It
requires that you create a project, design forms, and store metadata in
the target database. Maybe this is OK, as there are other tools that do
provide generic database browsing, but this may not meet user
expectations. Seems it would be better to keep the data and metadata
separate, and permit the user not to persistently save that metadata.

 -Tom