Search Results for 'bento'

[Mackay Steffensen]

Hello,

Thanks for the response. I do work with the labels at 400%, but the handles and the minimum height of the field make it a little tight in working in a small label. I attached a picture and the font is 7 pt. The field is the minimum height. With the snap to guides it can sometimes be tricky to get the field in the correct spot; it may jump offscreen. It would be nice to be able to see the part of the field outside of the label, maybe grayed out.

I still think it is great and it does what I need, and any future features are a bonus. However, I think one important feature to consider is offering both directions of fill; across row or down column. This was something I and many other people fought with in Bento.

Thanks again

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[Brendan]

Hi Jols,

heheh… ah, the what if you die question :-) I’ve heard it before.

Well, first of all, I don’t really like boats or fish, so probably won’t be fishing in Mazatlan anytime soon.

As for skydiving… been there, done that :-) I jumped about 32 times in my life. I know that’s not much, but it sure was a heck of a lot of fun. My highest jump was from 17,000 feet! Quite the long freefall and time under canopy. You should try it! It’s a lot of fun. But it’s also been 22 years since I’ve been skydiving, so that’s already been checked off of my bucket list.

As for the answer to your question, I have made an agreement with a local Calgary based iOS & Mac development shop to take over the development if anything were to happen to me. The company is Robots & Pencils ( http://www.robotsandpencils.com ). They’re a great company who have developed hundreds of apps. They’ve agreed to take on support and development for me in the case of my hopefully unlikely demise anytime soon. If you need custom app development done, I highly recommend them. I’ve done work for them myself (before Bento was ditched and made me way too busy to contract out my time) and they have a top-notch team of robots (developers), pencils (designers), and bosses (PM’s).

Thanks!

Brendan

[Mackay Steffensen]

My thinking is on a similar page. I am not using this as a mechanism to print labels, but rather to get multiple records per page. This is why I never embraced Bento as it was crippled in this area. I must give props to Brendan as the label feature accomplishes 99% of what I have been trying to do for years with other products. Granted it was possible, but not as easy as this so I am really excited. I know Brendan is responsive to suggestions (another reason to love Tap Forms) and I think it would be an important feature.
While I’m writing a wish list, I do find it a little difficult to work in the labels. I am working with a 1 inch by 1 inch label and it is somewhat difficult to work with the fields in the label at this scale. It is doable and the final output excellent, and after fighting other products I can live and be very happy as is.
Finally, it would be nice to control the fill of the ‘labels’ either by row or column.

Thanks!

[jols]

THANKS Brendan,

Upon reviewing icloud, it does look more secure than I thought, especially with two-step verification enabled.

Okay, so this makes me feel more comfortable with using your product with iCloud syc, but please help me with the following if you would.

For years, we were Bento users, and now as you know that’s going poof. I imagine this concern is not easy to address, but what if you fall off your Yacht while shark fishing in Mazatlan, or your chute fails to open while trying to check off skydiving from your bucket list. Will TapForms then also go poof, or spat as it were?

[TEIB]

I think it is an issue with the iCloud sync not working.

Please let me know how to merge the forms. I already checked, and there are no duplicates.

Both the main address book and the small address book use a custom template with several tabs originally created in Bento – if I exported as a CSV file wouldn’t I loose all of that?

Thanks for your help!

[David Butenhof]

I am just wondering that when exporting and importing CSV into forms when updating or appending data where form linkages exist, is there anything special that needs to be done with record_ids that store the linkage information.

The record in the child form included UUID columns for the parent form, the parent field that refers to the child, and the parent record ID. If you export a linked child form, you’ll see those columns, and you have to make sure you don’t change them if you’re planning to add data (such as your scheme of adding columns) and re-import into the same form. (And if you delete and re-create the parent, then those values will all change.)

This was the part I had to work out manually (thanks to Brendan’s information on the TapForms sqlite schema) in order to generate and import child forms from my Bento Simple List data. The big step is understanding what’s happening under the covers, and one of the fantastic things about TapForms is that we can directly talk to the developer who’s willing to share information like that.

Your question is a little vague, and I’m not entirely certain what you want to do (it sounds like you might actually want to avoid re-importing with linkages?), but in any case I hope this helps you understand what the data means.

[David Butenhof]

Can I ask what you are using to edit CSV files and what was featured in your screenshots?

The screen shots were from TextWrangler, a free and powerful text editor oriented towards programming.

David, I just have a question re the Record ID field. If I maintain the 150 records, and keep adding fields for the weekly updates, does the Record ID change when a new field is added to an existing record?

The record ID isn’t changed. It’s generated when the record is first created, and that’s how TapForms can track changes to the record when you synchronize changes through iCloud. If two records have the same ID, then they’re different “versions” of the same record.

So if you initially create your form in TapForms with the first column of each of your rows (records), and export that as CSV, from then on you should be able to just modify the CSV and re-import the changes. To TapForms, this is essentially the same thing as making the changes on another device and then synchronizing through iCloud.

In fact you could start out with the CSV and creating the record IDs yourself, then import that into TapForms to create the form in the first place. That’s what I did to import a lot of Bento data with Simple Lists, which TapForms doesn’t support. However in your case letting TapForms generate the record IDs is safer and just as easy.

[Roger Neilson]

Have to say this is a miss from Bento, its just irritating that we have to keep jumping between forms.

Roger

[David Butenhof]

Yes, calculation doesn’t seem to be very thoroughly documented.

In particular, as you say, it’s not clear what options (if any) exist for computations based on related form data, which is something I’d really like to see.

This is another “Bento conversion” issue I hadn’t gotten around to bringing up here. I used to have “parent form” fields totaling or counting fields from related data, and if TapForms is capable of that there are no clues in the documentation I can find.

[Bit of Fluff]

I have a form imported from Bento, it has two sub forms (bento created them as related data fields) when i try to add a new record to the master form when i get to the subform to add the data in there it opens up the subform as a separate form – is there any setting I can tick / something I can change so that it doesnt do this and lets me continue to enter the data in the subform part of the original form ?
Hope that makes sense !!

[David Butenhof]

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”.

[David Butenhof]

Yeah, I’d considered that route, too; but there didn’t seem to be any more automated way to accomplish that transition, and I’ve got way too many records to edit manually.

I never really liked the idea of using related data because you end up with the “child” library visible at the same level as the parent, and it seemed messy. In native SQL programming you’d naturally use a set of tables but they’d never be directly visible at the UI unless there was a reason to expose them. The Bento 4 Simple List concept seemed to make a lot more sense to me at the time, in some primitive way almost like a representation of a SQL table with a built-in join. In retrospect, I suppose that I probably should have realized it was too unique to be “safe”.

From your perspective inside TapForms, importing Simple List data from a Bento CSV into a linked form would be easy. (I have no idea how it looks in a Template.) Whether it’s worth your time is of course another question, but it certainly would have made my transition easier. ;-)

Anyway, thanks for the dialog. And Happy Holidays!

[Brendan]

Actually I think one of my other customers had converted them into Related Data fields in Bento before importing into Tap Forms.

They created a Related Data field and then used copy and paste to transfer the simple list values into the Related Data field.

Tap Forms imports Related Data fields just fine and coverts them to Link to Form fields.

Thanks!

Brendan

[David Butenhof]

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.

[Akron Design]

Brendan,

Thank-you for the reply! The code helped. It was working, there just wasn’t any notification within tapforms to let me know. The sync has finished to the iPad. It looks great.

Unfortunately, I have a new issue. Now that the records are on the iPad, we tried to use the camera (since we can’t use the Macbook) and it allows you to take the photo, generates a thumbnail but for some reason it won’t load the image within the record if its taken on the iPad. It does load all the photos that were synced from Bento. Any ideas?

Thanks again!