LO crashes on restart; continually.

users
#1

ubuntu 12.04

While fooling with mail merge, I decided to clean up my databases... I deleted them all and recreated the one I needed with a new name. That was a major mistake from which I was unable to recover, as now my fields don't match the database. At the same time, I added a few fields, one of which was a currency field. Currency comes with a comma as the thousands seperator. Which meant I could no longer use commas as my seperator in my CSV file. So, I saved it as a tab seperated file. So far, so good.

While converting all of the fields to use the new database, LO crashed (nothing new, it crashes about every 5 minutes). Because of these constant crashes I save each and every time I make just about any change whatsoever. I was nearly done with my changes.

The difference this time is that, it goes through the recovery process - and then crashes again. It's done this before, but typically a second restart is enough to get it past the problem, it recovers various files - fails to recover others that no longer exist - and then all is well and I continue my journey. This time, no amount of restarting LO will get it to stop crashing.

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance.

- Andrew

#2

Deleting the user profile seems to resolve the issue mentioned below.

Interestingly, the field names seem to have changed seemingly for the better. Whereas before it was inserting things something like filename.databasename.sheetname.fieldname, now I get "fieldname".

Unfortunately, after running the mailmerge, it seems to have made the values in the first record (I only have one record currently) a permanent part of the fields. For example in the fieldname "street name", it has "Elm St", where it should instead simply have "street name" making my .odt file useless as a mail merge document, so I'll have to go through it for the fifth time and change all the fields yet again.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance.

#3

A wrote:

Interestingly, the field names seem to have changed seemingly for the
better. Whereas before it was inserting things something like
filename.databasename.sheetname.fieldname, now I get "fieldname".

Unfortunately, after running the mailmerge, it seems to have made the
values in the first record (I only have one record currently) a
permanent part of the fields. For example in the fieldname "street
name", it has "Elm St", where it should instead simply have "street
name" making my .odt file useless as a mail merge document, so I'll have
to go through it for the fifth time and change all the fields yet again.

Are you sure they're not still fields? I think after the mailmerge runs, the fields end up showing data from one of the entries rather than the field name, but if you re-run mailmerge they do still work as fields. You can see the field codes rather than the final data by setting Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > View > Field Codes.

This then shows the full databasename.tablename.fieldname code, which from your previous comment may not be completely ideal, but at least you can check that they are still fields and not static text. Also, fields are shown with a grey background, although I'm not sure if that's another option I've set some time in the past.

Mark.

#4

Yes, you're right.

I've also found that the fields can be "reset" so the data is purged from the fields by Edit > Exchange Database.
I've also found that if the fields are changed in the original (now new) CSV file then this seems to be what's required:

First delete the old database file registration:

Tools > Options > Base > Databases > Select > Delete (/home/username/path/to/db/DB.odb) > Yes > OK

File > New > Database > Connect Existing > Text > (/home/username/path/to/CSVfile/) > Select > CSV > Next > Register > Finish > DB.odb

where DB is the filename you choose, and path is your desired path (obviously?).

Here is what appears to be a nice tutorial on how to mail merge. https://beginlinux.com/blog/2013/03/mailmerge-on-openoffice-and-libreoffice/
I can't vouch for it as I didn't really read it, I simply grabbed one piece of info out of the middle, but the pictures look accurate based on the 3 seconds I spent looking at them.

Maybe this will help someone else and maybe someone will incorporate some of this info. into the help files. This represents hours of trial & error and research and painful head banging, hair ripping, teeth gnashing and cussing and screaming.

- Andrew

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
errr, is LO still crashing ridiculously often or did you fix that by
renaming the User Profile?

Crashing used to be often caused by Java being slightly behind but
that seems to have dropped away now that so many people have moved
away from Java entirely. If you are using the internal back-end
(rather than MySql, Postgresql or something) for your database then
you do still need java so please just update it to the ultra-latest
version. Typically, since Oracle took it over, it seems to need
updating about 1/month.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: