Hi Ann,
Sorry for not responding to your email sooner. I did just respond a little while ago.
Sometimes I respond to all my emails in the morning and sometimes at the end of the evening. Although my morning doesn’t usually start until 11:00 am or so as I’m quite the night owl. This just happened to be an end of evening email day for me. I’m often working on developing the next updates to Tap Forms during the day and part of the evening, so don’t always get to the emails until just before I go to sleep.
And it’s perfectly fine to post any type of questions here. In fact, it’s better than email because others can learn from the answers too.
What kind of help do you need with your migration from Bento? You did send a couple screenshots and I responded about that. It looked to me like the Forms List was just hidden in Tap Forms. So you were only seeing the one form.
Thanks!
Brendan
I need some help from someone who has time to answer questions about switching from Bento to Tap Forms. I have done some initial work but I have many questions about how to do things but I cannot find these answers in the tutorial. What I want isn’t difficult or technical. I don’t want to clog up the forum with a lot of basic questions so if someone would be willing to have email contact with me so that I can ask questions, I would very much appreciate it. It has been really, really hard giving up Bento as it works perfectly for my database.
Yes that’s right. I believe Bento just let other copies of Bento connect to the one device, like a client/server system. However, there may be other ways of breaking the infinite sync loop that I haven’t thought about.
I tried to make Tap Forms familiar to Bento customers. But since I was not a Bento engineer and I never had access to the Bento source code, it’s not exactly the same. Just my take on an easy to use database creation app.
Ok thanks. Am I able to write a script that would do that once a day? Do I take it that the reason Bento could auto update the calculation was because the database was shared from a single computer?
This is not a huge issue at all, I’m just converting a Bento database that we use at work and it will end up being used by 3 or 4 people and the less anyone has to remember to do something the better.
BTW, I LOVE how I can make this look so similar to my Bento solution, it’s really going to help with an easy transition for us.
@Philip,
FileMaker Pro databases are not SQLite based. Bento was based on SQLite. But not FMPro. They have their own proprietary database file format.
And Tap Forms supports importing data from Bento because Bento can export the template as an XML file and all the data as .json files and all the images in separate folders all referenced by the .json data file. The .bentoTemplate files contain all this data when exported by Bento.
So that’s how I import Bento data, not by reading the SQLite file directly.
Brendan, I agree. I’ve also been in touch with David at .com solutions. He has authored an app called FMPro Migrator (I’m sure you know all about it). He pointed out that TapForms already supports Bento, which uses SQLite. If TapForms could provide support for directly importing SQLite databases, then I and others in a similar situation could use FMPro Migrator to move our databases from FileMaker to TapForms. Do you have any plans along those lines for the future?
I’ve just been in touch with the developer of FMPro Migrator (http://www.fmpromigrator.com/products/fmpro%5Fmigrator/index.html).
He suggested that if Tap Forms could implement support for directly importing SQLite databases, then FMPro Migrator could work with FileMaker as well as with Bento. And because Tap Forms already supports Bento (which uses SQLite), they already have some code in place to make that possible.
So I’m hoping that someone from the Tap Forms team will see this and respond.
Bento only ever supported syncing from a Mac to an iPad and it was manual sync as well. Though you’re going between two devices and you’re cognisant of having to do the sync otherwise your changes didn’t get to the other side. You had to be aware of it and explicitly do it though perhaps for some folk that would make it more explicit if the same behaviour occurred with Tap Forms.
Multi master sync is hard, especially when you factor in sync failures, devices that might be offline frequently and conflicting edits. My understanding is that Tap Forms automatically resolves the conflicts based on the last record edited. However that can still inadvertently lead to data loss if you edit a record on a device, realise that it’s out of sync and then trigger the sync you will loose data. Last write wins is a common resolution strategy. An alternative would be having to manually reconcile every change and perhaps that’s an improvement but that could in some situations lead to hundreds or thousands of records being out of sync (an updated calculation or script could easily trigger changes to records).
iCloud Sync seems consistently problematic which in part makes sense because it’s backed by Apple’s notoriously finicky platform. Even Apple’s own apps mess up iCloud so I’m not surprised that Tap Forms has some challenges with the platform too. I am more curious about the Nearby Sync and Cloudant failures though.
For Nearby Sync I found quirks at times when everything talked to everyone because you’re basically inviting a race condition to occur. I did have some weirdness at times in propagation that generally got solved by moving it to a star topology where Tap Forms on my iMac had every other device added to it and then every other device only had the iMac. Nearby Sync works on a pull basis when the app is open and only when you’re on the same network, so it is actually easy to open up the app, make changes and realise that your device is out of sync. Nearby Sync I think is great if your devices are at a single location and you can have one instance of Tap Forms (I use a Mac but you could use any device that runs Tap Forms) open consistently for everything to sync against. If you have multiple devices and they aren’t always running Tap Forms when the changes are made then you will end up with situations where devices don’t have all of the changes because Tap Forms needs to be on at the same time on those devices for nearby sync to work.
The Cloudant/CouchDB side should make that better because it’s a hosted server model. Instead of having one Tap Forms app open all of the time, there is a server that is always on. That said if you lose connectivity to that server, you can’t push the changes but offline editing will still happen. There are a few situations where I believe Tap Forms will pause sync indefinitely depending on the error it receives (e.g. unable to connect to the server), that could trip someone up who is expecting it to be working but not realising it hasn’t been. This is generally easy to triage: on the Mac if you look at the bottom right after you make a change the “last uploaded” time should update and if you make a change on another device last downloaded should change; those same timestamps exist on iOS on the Tools tab.
Hopefully that helps folk out and make sync a little more reliable.
Maybe back to the (Bento) roots with an all-new-database. Less details and features for stable sync and data security.
And I again add my name to this list of disaffected sync-ers. None of three suggested mechanisms (iCloud, Cloudant, or Nearby) work for me – either sync doesn’t happen or it is incomplete or wipes out records on one of my 4 devices (2 iPads, an iPhone, and a MacBook Pro). Brendan, you told me a few months ago in a private email exchange that sync was the bane of your existence. Until you get it fixed reliably (Cloudant was good before IBM took it over and it became incredibly complex to setup), I can no longer use your software even tho I have been a user ever since Bento disappeared.
I migrated Bento to Tap forms and use it mainly as a recipe database. I have tried to change the colour of text in, say ingredients, and duly saved the edit. Next time I access the record, the colour change has defaulted back to black.
If I change the text colour on my Mac, the change is evident in IOS, but only for a short while. Sometimes the colour change (of a paragraph or individual word) is displayed in, for example ingredients, and stays there.
Can you help. Am I missing something. All seems to work well for the Mac, but the issue is evident on the IOS version. I am currently the most up to date versions of Tap Forms on both the Mac and IOS device.
Hi Stephen, it’s an issue I’ve tried to put up with this I started using TapForms because it’s such a great flexible database system much like Bento was, but as I’ve developed office systems and noticed dropped fields/data it can’t be trusted, unless I probably turn off sync altogether, but defeats the point of it, as it’s great having my data available across my devices.
Not sure what other flexible alternatives there are, Nino looks interesting, as does AirTables, but non offer the power as TapForms. Hoping a fix comes soon.
Hi David,
I definitely feel your pain. Don’t know if you saw my other thread from the other day I have random missing fields on different devices even missing when I do a restore from a good database. It’s totally confusing.
Problem is that I’m definitely getting to the stage I can’t trust the data. What is right and what is wrong. It’s obviously something going on if more than one person is coming across it.
Problem is I quite liked Tap Forms and have been with them since Bento disappeared. Having paid for it I’m loathed to pay for another. Are there any suggestions on what other one to use? I like the simplicity and versatility of Tap Forms but if reliability is a problem I might be forced to leave too.
My other thread at:
Form That Has Dropped Fields
I have a bunch of what I call task specific layouts that make sense for each use. A simple example is my main purchases form where I have the default layout (which itself is broken up by section headings to allow me to collapse areas), a details view that actually was inspired by my original Bento layout that has a subset of the default layout, quick entry which has the fields I generally need to change the most inputting a purchase, relationships which gives me an overview of how the record is connected to it’s related forms (line items, gallery, sibling purchase entries and shipments) and a quick details which is a much more limited overview that fits on all of my devices without scrolling. There’s a QR pane as well but I rarely use that, it was something I was experimenting with for printing and wouldn’t want to review.
I have scripting I use to jump into Tap Forms at various places (perhaps not surprising based on the forum posts) and having layout support would be useful. I could see for others having workflow integration from external applications though obviously I can only speak for my uses.
Hello all, after my beloved Bento gave up a couple of weeks ago, I switched to TapForms and I’m not disappointed. In fact, I’m so pleased with it that I deleted Bento altogether and I can also trash the old MacBook I kept around just for the purpose of the one Bento database that I cherish :-)
Importing the Bento data was very easy and without a glitch and pretty quickly found my way around Tap Forms to customise a form. Synching to my iPad works like a dream (except for today, perhaps the update?) but I have one question: my movie database has a large “description” (text) field but on the iPad I can only see a very limited part of this description: the beginning of it and when I tap on it, it shows me the last bit of the description. There’s no pop-up or fly-out field on the iPad to show the entire description. The description is restricted to the one-line box.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to see the entire description on my iPad also?
