Export -> Import round trip, linked forms

I didn’t write <from_form>, you did, on the export. I also thought it was curious that none of the linked records had any value in that column — but I had no particular basis to second guess the export. However, I just tried editing the .csv to say just <form> — and it doesn’t appear to make any difference.

I import the main Books form, and then one of the linked forms. I edit the main form’s fields to make them links, the embedded tables appear on the records, but they don’t show the records that had been linked to that book.

Is this perhaps because I’d originally checked the “Show Inverse Relationship” box? I suppose I should go back and try without that to see if there’s a difference, but I hadn’t gotten around to that.

Bento started behaving unreliably on Yosemite. For some, it apparently doesn’t run at all. For me, it runs, albeit with some occasional odd dialog boxes or hangs. Clearly, it’s time to jump ship — even if it’s still not entirely clear there’s a safe place to land.

Most of my Bento forms imported into TapForms flawlessly, so thanks for that! However, the two main forms where I made use of Bento Simple Lists remain problematic. They’re too big to re-enter manually. I can’t shut down Bento for good without moving them. And I’ve still got no handle on how to do it.

I had written a Python script that would strip out the Simple Lists from a Bento CSV export into separate forms which, in theory, could be imported into TapForms. Having been unable to accomplish this, I’d resorted to round-trip TapForms export/import; and as recorded in this thread back in the Spring, I’d had trouble even getting that to work. But that was a demo version.

Now I’ve gotten around to trying again with the released TapForms 3.0.2; and it’s not working any better than it did back then.

I created a simple Movies form, with a linked Movie Viewings form. I entered two movies, more or less randomly, with one viewing each, and this seemed to be working just fine.

So I exported the parent (Movies), and TapForms created a Movies folder containing Movies.csv and Movie Viewings.csv. Each shows two records, as expected, with all the UUID columns apparently intact. In the attached archive file, you can see the Movies folder and the contents.

I then Deleted both forms from TapForms, and imported the Movies.csv parent.

First oddity: it imported the form just fine, but with no records. I have to import a second time to get the data.

Now I go on to import Movie Viewings. The form imports fine, with data. Now I go back to Movies, and edit the fields, selecting Movie Viewings form the Link to Form popup on the appropriate record. The embedded table appears; however, no matter what I try, I can’t seem to get it to actually find the data in in the child form. The table is empty. This obviously doesn’t do me any good; and if I can’t re-import exported TapForms data, it’s no surprise that I can’t make my converted Bento data work.

Note that if I export the imported data, the Movie Viewings.csv file shows no data, only the headings. Clearly the linkage didn’t work correctly. This is the Movies1 folder in the archive file.

So am I missing something, or does this just not work?

One of the problems is that the Movie Viewings CSV file contains the parent_form_id value for each record.

So are you suggesting then that the re-import will work better if I DELETE that column from the file you export? I tried removing that, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference for me.

In terms of my actual goal, this suggests that I shouldn’t try to generate this column for my Bento data, which is useful info. I’d wondered exactly how TapForms used that on import since there’s no reference in the parent form. (And presumably the parent_field_id would have the same problem.)

It makes sense that these UUID values would help in adding rows to an existing form, and I suppose that could apply when manually syncing data between systems; but in general, what’s the point in exporting them?

And since a Tap Forms Form file (.tff) will also include any linked forms embedded, then you need only export the parent Movies form.

While this is fine for the “dry run” where I’m trying to at least get a round-trip TapForms export to come back into TapForms intact, it doesn’t help for my real goal unless I can figure out how to generate a .tff from my Bento data. And getting my TapForms to TapForms experiment to work using techniques that I can’t apply to the Bento data doesn’t actually help me.

If you want to make a new form to import into, then you would have to find out what the internal UUID is of the new form and then change the parent_form_id values of the exported child form’s CSV file to match that.

OK, that makes sense; I was assuming way too much about how TapForms handled the export and import. And that may be exactly the clue that I needed. It’ll make the import more tedious and only partly automatic. However I really only need to make this work for three Simple List forms to complete my transition from Bento: the manual lookup (and a simple search-and-replace on the CSV file) is acceptable.

I got this working, and one of my two Simple List Bento databases now seems to be operational in TapForms. Awesome!

I did run into one annoyance, though it was something that I decided I could live with since the workaround would be messy.

There are two separate date format in the Bento CSV file … one was an actual data column in my intended schema, of the form 2014-12-25; and the other was Bento’s created & modified timestamps of the form 2014-12-25T21:02:22.

If I set TapForms’ date format to the latter to get the correct timestamps, then it would fail to parse my dates; whereas if I set it to the former, then it would ignore all of Bento’s creation and modification timestamps and substitute the current time.

Now, really, the latter behavior is acceptable, although it does bother me just a little. I don’t really need to preserve the original modification timestamp, although I’m just obsessive enough that I hate having to throw away that data. However, since you have special processing for the creation & modification timestamps, I’d think you should also be able to handle a different expected format for them — they have to be full timestamps, not just “dates” or “times”.