sorry forgotten
OO.o 3.0 m13

Martin

Care to attach sample files (.odb & .dbf)? Without knowing at least the settings
you made in the database document, this issue is hardly confirm, deny, or fix.

frank, there is no place to set anything in that.
System is DE on WIN2K.
DBF-files need to be decoded by CP 437 
(note ANSI and ASCII is a diffence in other languages only) 
UNICODE-8 is use wrong
 
Martin

> frank, there is no place to set anything in that.

Edit / Database / Properties / Additional Settings
?

ah - I see - and worked, but I am not safisified with that.

First, from writer-menues there is not such setting DATABASE or PROPERTIES available

Going directly to EXCHANGE DATABASE does not open a DBF-files directly but
starts the build of the ODB-files, which gives the opportunity to do the
appropriate settings. Okay, for a simple DBF-file quite a lot of overhead, first
to build the ODB-"container", do the settings, and after selecting that
"container" choosing the TABLE, allinall not very userfriendly.
And wasn't it, that dbf-files should be opened directly, with doing the
appropriate settings (Codepage) directly in the destination/writer-file? 

However, SYSTEM and UNICODE are nonsens for the defaults of DBF-files, so manual
setting is always needed,  and as there is no place to store the CP-settings in
advance, I treat this still as a defect.

And not to forget: The Help gives no information about that! 

But - ofcorse, having a workaround makes it P3 only, so I set that back.
Martin


P.S:
As the content of the data-browser from "F4" and the "options.menu" may vary  -
while a refresh-feature for F4-windows is missing - something need to be done in
that anyhow.   

Okay, your last comment indicates you did something with mail merge, or database
fields in Writer, which wasn't clear to me at all.

Do you mind adding a step-by-step description of what you're doing to show the
problem?

I believe you that there is a problem, but I still didn't understand where
exactly it lies. I suppose that somewhere in the work flow, OOo should ask you
for an encoding, but I am not sure where. So please be as detailed and precise
as possible with your problem description.

==>fs

yes, it is about fields in a writer-page like forms/serialletters, just reading.
the idea was to have multiple dbf-files with one record only, where the dbf is
build from a DOS-application

my standard-procedure is like this
-- have a central directory for all dbf-files
-- produce the one needed an copy it to that dir
-- open old writer-form with fields
-- save as new 
-- exchange database
---- browse to new DBF and choose it
---- select desired table in that
---- "define"
-- start F4 from writer
-- select the new "DBF" (which is ofcorse the ODB)
-- right-click and choose edit database
-- Base-Module opens - choose table
-- select properties/additional settings 
-- set code-page to CP 437/US (manual select out of 50 items)(default is SYSTEM)
-- click ok and close/save that odb
-- close with F4 (settings are not refreshed)
-- open f4 again
finish - working (a long way - isnt it)


at least two problems
-- the CP-settings needs to be done always as above
-- the browser-window will be overcrowed soon, as every as source choosen ODB is
in there.

the most prefered method would be to have to set the defaults in TOOLS/OPTIONS,
but there seems to be no place to do that. 


Byetheway: that dbf-directory is also accessable via ODBC as a single
datasource.That will show all dbf-files with the right codepage at once.
frankly, I treat that way as more comfortable, athough using the propriative
build-in DBase-driver has it's pros.


Martin

as for your last comment: That's a shortcoming of the integration of Base in
Writer. Base itself is fully capable of treating a folder as collection of
tables, represented by single .dbf files. For this, just go to
Edit/Database/Properties when you have the .odb open, and change the location to
a folder instead of a single file. Just writer doesn't seem to offer folder
browsing in this place ...

For the original problem: That's a shortcoming of Writer, too. I changed the
summary accordingly, changed the issue type to ENHANCEMENT (since this is what
we really have here: a request for enhancement), added the "usability" keyword
(since I agree that's a usability issue), confirmed the issue as valid problem,
and assigned it to the responsible developer.

fs->os: Your's to target, I'd say.

Target set to 3.x

Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".