An iCal importer for Open Office Calc would have the widest appeal and widest platform support.

I have written a simple importer for Open Office 3.1.1. I have not tested it on other versions of OO.

You can download it here: iCal_Import_04

After an Import

One of the things that I needed to do was to add up times that I spent on certain activities. By adopting conventions about how to fill in the event summary field, and adding a column for Duration, it’s easy to do this.

To use the importer, download it and unpack it to your hard drive. You may need to adjust your Security settings to allow macros to run, and possibly set a folder on your hard drive as a trusted source.

Open the spreadsheet with Open Office 3.1.1 or later. I suggest you Save As… to a new name as soon as you open it to avoid modifying the original file. Once you have saved it with the name you like, run the main macro as follows:

Run a Macro

and choose the macro MAIN from the file.

Select the Main Macro

Browse for the ics file, and set the time zone offset:

iCal importer dialog

Next click the Import File button to import the calendar file.

After an Import

After the import you can adjust the column widths, sort the data and add new colunns to analyze the data.

Select to Sort

Select rows 2 to the end to sort the data. Do not select the column headers.

Sort Dialog

Here we sort by column C, the subject.

After Sort and adding Duration

The import sheet comes with the duration column pre-loaded. The formula for the duration is:

=24*(TIMEVALUE(B2) – TIMEVALUE(A2) )

Of course charts and other analyses can be easily done now that the data is in a spreadsheet.

The importer is distributed with a GPL V3 license.

Enjoy,

- Windy

Managing a stable of characters in an RPG is a complicated process. My limited experience with MMORPGs indicates that it can be more efficient to build more than one character at a time. At least it is more interesting. In the two MMORPGs that I’ve tried I’ve built several characters to try to learn more about the game and the character classes. In 2Moons I’m currently running six characters. This is efficient since as they level up all the interesting loot is saved for the other characters and one higher level character can finance a lower level character’s purchase of expensive items.

But, the downside of doing this is you have to keep track of all the loot that each character has and what they need. In Guild Wars this was easy because there is an account-wide storage facility where all the loot is kept. But with 2Moons, each character has a separate stash, or storage locker, so you have to remember what’s in each one to avoid wasting time with items that you already have collected.

I’ve started to build an Open Office database to store this data for my 2Moons characters. I’ve got the data scheme designed and some reports done, but at this point I need Forms to fill out the various data. The data is in Normal Form and I’m not sure how to build a form to allow entry of the data. First let’s review the data design and the queries.

This is the character table.

This is the armor table.

The details are not important unless you are a 2Moons player. There are too many types of armor to have a table for that. Instead of a Armor Name Table, we just list the armor name. Each armor type has 5 matching pieces. Some intermediate armor types only have one or two parts, but we ignore that detail. This table allows us to keep the status of each bit of armor that we need and which pieces we have.

But the interesting case is the stones case. For the collection of stones, there are only a few types so that there is a table of stone names. And we want a report of the number of stones kept by each character.

This is in fully normal form, just a list of the character id, stone type id, and the number of stones.

Here is a query that gets the list for a report:

So that is clear enough.

But what about the forms to fill out the data. So far I’ve been filling out the data manually by editing the tables. This is ok for the characters, but for the Armor, Weapons and Stones, this is not convienent since the numbers of the character records and stone types have to be entered manually.

I’d like to have a form for the Armor that allows the Character to be set with a pull-down, and a Stones form that allows the Character and Stone Type to be set from pull-down lists.

Can someone show me an example of this?

Here is the Open Office Database file: 2moons_characters_example

Thanks,

- Windy

Update:

Thanks to VooBase on the OpenOffice.org Forums for suggestions and pointers to using a listbox to solve the problem. I have solved the problem and the forms work just fine.

Here are the forms to modify the Armor, Weapons and Stones held by each of the characters. The characters entries can be made or modified by using any of these forms. The list of stone types has to be modified manually by editing the table at this point, but adding a form to do this is trivial.

[All the data in the database is correct- these are my 2Moons characters. But the account names have been modified obviously, for security reasons. See you in game if you like. ]

Here is the Armor Form:

By selecting any field in the character field above, you can scan through the characters and modify any fields you like. By selecting the subform below, you can add or modify entries in the armor table. Note that the character field is a list, so you can pull-down from the available characters. This allows you to move armor among characters. Note that the armor is sorted by the highest level first, which is normally the most interesting armor.

Here is the Weapons form with the character list pulled down:

This form works the same as the Armor form.

Here is the Stones Form. This form has two pulldown lists, one for character and one for stones type:

And here is the Stone_ID column open showing the settings:

The Wizard does not work in the Spreadsheet format of the subform. But I was able to create a field in the form using the wizard and then copied the settings from the List Control to the column to get it to work. The character_ID column control settings are identical to the separate control. I wrote the Select statement for the Stone_ID column by example from the Character_ID field.  I have no idea what the bound field means.

The other issue I ran into is how to add the label for the entire form above the fields. To solve this problem, I changed the anchor point for all the controls to Page and then moved them down. Then created a label, anchored it to the page, moved it and set the font to size 24.

Each time you save the form, you need to go to the database dialog and save it all too. If something crashes without you doing this, you will lose all your work, as I did. BTW, this was built with Open Office 2.4.

Here is the updated example:2moons_characters_example2

Enjoy, if this application helps you with 2Moons or in any other way, I’d prefer an acknowledgment and a note saying how it helped. DISCLAIMER: Like all software you find, your use of this is at your own risk. If there are bugs, I’ll help if I can.

Cheers, and see you online.

- windy

Dynamic reports fail with the data not matching the column headers. Static reports work.

Update: This is a known problem. The problem is that the name TITLE doesn’t work as a report column. This means that no column of a database table can be named TITLE if dynamic tables are used.

Here is the table. This is an OO native database. The database is provide below.

Use the Report Wizard to generate a Dynamic Report with the following columns.

Note that the report is wrong. The AUTHOR appears under the title. It doesn’t matter whether we sort on the title, as intended or not. The bug still appears if the report is dynamic.

The data is correct if a static report is generated with the same fields.

This is a ZIP archive of the native database. 609KB.

windybooks_native ZIP

- windy

When building a database of my DVD collection which includes BLOB images of png images of the covers, the database can be backed up, but it cannot be restored. This of course makes the backups useless. The images are 475×475 pixel PNG images.

UPDATE: Problem solved. Parameter max_allowed_packet is the packet size for requests. This defaults to 1M and needs to be larger to allow this restore to work. Setting the max_allowed_packet parameter to 10M allowed the restore to complete successfully.

I’m using MySQL administrator 1.2.12, MySQL 5.0.51b-Community-nt, MySQL client version 5.1.11 running on Windows Vista Ultimate x86 SP1.

The database was built using OpenOffice 2.4.

Using the default backup settings, the error on restore was:

Error while executing this query:INSERT INTO `dvd-collection` (`dvd_ID`,`MovieTitle`,`Director`,`Producer`,`Actor`,`Genre`,
`Notes`,`Rating`,`Review`,`Subject`,`Writer`,`Format`,
`Source`,`DateAcquired`,`ReleaseYear`,`MPAARating`,
`Length`,`disk_image`) VALUES
(1,’Step Into Liquid.’,'Dana Brown’,NULL,’Robert August,
Rochelle Ballard, Shawn Barron, Dave Kalama, Gerry Lopez,
Robert \”Wingnut\” Weaver’,'Documentary’,
‘No stuntmen. No stereotypes. No other feeling comes close’,
5,NULL,’Surfing’,'Dana Brown’,'DVD’,'DishNetwork’,2006,2003,
‘PG’,88,0×89504E…44AE426082);
The server has returned this error message:MySQL server has gone away
MySQL Error.

Using these additional settings:

• InnoDB Online Backup
• No EXTENDED INSERTS
• Add DROP Statements
• Complete INSERTS
• Comment
• Compatibility Mode
• Disable Keys

The error was:

Unknown object in backup file

Download excerpts of the SQL files that fail to restore:

mysql_restore_bug 1.4MB

DVD_Backup_2_40_Rows 14MB

These excerpts fail as well. The complete SQL backup file is 270MB, so not only is it large but I don’t really want to share the entire file. By the way, “Analyze Backup File Content” works fine for all the files.

The mysql command fails as well:
C:\Darrell\Video_Database\backups>mysql --user=root --password=mysecret dvd_video < DVD_Backup_2_40_Rows.sql
ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line 89: MySQL server has gone away
C:\Darrell\Video_Database\backups>mysql --user=root --password=mysecret dvd_video < DVD_Video_Two_Rows_Second_Try.sql
C:\Darrell\Video_Database\backups>

It works for 2 rows, but not for the 40 row file.

Thanks,

Windy