Hi,

I've been discussing this issue on the dba list. In summary using the built in 
dBase is inadequate in a live multiuser environment because of the locking 
approach. That leaves ODBC as the only workable option. ODBC however takes far 
too long to display the data source so it appears not to be working.

The situation is as follows:

An OpenOffice.org user views the dBase data in the data source where the dBase 
data is set up using the internal dBase driver. 

The main user of the application goes to edit the data using their
application. The application fails because it now has read only access to
the data so the internal dBase driver is not acceptable.

We then turn to use the ODBC driver for dBase files.

The above scenario works fine for MS Word using ODBC and it is very fast.
The data in MS Word is presented to the user as read only, ensuring the user
cannot edit the live data inadvertently.

NOTE: I have only tested this on my own FoxBaseIII+ multiuser application I
wrote many years ago. Not on Visual Foxpro or CA Visual Objects based
applications.

Issue 13495 is probably the same issue but is closed. I think this should be 
reviewed again.

I have spent hours looking for an official ODBC driver 4.00.6200.00 as
mentioned in issue 13495 to test it, but have not yet found it anywhere. The 
driver even on new Windows XP machines is still 4.00.6019.00 so this is what 
users will generally have.

I tested the ODBC connection against my FoxbaseIII+ dBase data and it took 2 
minutes 47 seconds to open a table in the data source window. The table has 
746 records and 44 fields. Repeating this test a number of times did produce 
variable results of 42 seconds, 2 minutes 47 seconds again and 3 minutes 10 
seconds (when pressing F4 and then opening the same table again).

The same table opened using the internal dBase driver takes 2 seconds.

Such long times using the ODBC driver is not acceptable. 

The ODBC driver is also not the best way either as there is no way that I
can see to make the records read only for the OpenOffice.org user.

With the current options available should I have to go ahead and provide
clients with access to their data, then this most likely will now need to be
done using MS products unless there are further alternatives I have not
considered.

This appears IMHO to be a fairly big hole in one of the strengths of 
OpenOffice.org to use external data sources.

To duplicate the problem
Set up the biblio table as an ODBC data source
Open the data source window (F4 in Writer)
Open the table.

I just did this and it took 1 minute 32 seconds to open which is not 
acceptable. Closed using F4 and reopened and again it to 1 minute 30 seconds.

I hope this feedback is of assistance.

Kelvin