There is a reasonably straightforward workaround.
You’ve already got a “Contact On” date field. Create an additional calculation field (named “Days to Contact”) for the number of days to the “Contact On” date, using this formula:
Days to Contact = ( [Contact On] – $now ) / 60 / 60 / 24
This calculates the difference between “now” and the “Contact On” date in seconds, and then converts it to days.
Use the calculation field for the criteria for the saved searches you need. When the “Contact On” field is empty, the “Days to Contact” field calculates as a very large negative number (-16,043 in my test form). So to find records with empty “Contact On” fields, create a saved search with a criterion of:
Days to Contact | is less than or equal to | -1000
(or some similarly large negative number).
To list due contacts, create a saved search with two criteria:
Days to Contact | is less than or equal to | 0
Days to Contact | is greater than| -1000
The second criterion excludes records with an empty “Contact On” field.
This seems to work pretty well in the small test form I created, and is actually pretty flexible. Hope it helps.
I am also a Bento convert, and find Tap Forms can meet all my needs with a few workarounds like the above. The only feature I miss is string concatenation.
— John Martin
Thanks Brendan. One other thing I used to use a lot in Bento was showing all entries that don’t have that date field set, which would be great to have too – could be just an “is empty” option on the date field search drop-down.
Just to give you some context, I’m a musician and have been using Bento to keep track of venues I need to contact. So I have one field for “contact on”. Then I can easily see who I’m due to contact by showing any entry that has “contact on” set to today or in the past. Then I had another saved search using “contact on”=empty, so I could see which venues I’ve not set a contact date for yet.
I’m guessing there are other users who might find this useful but thought I’d give you at least one use case!
Thanks, Frank
Hi
I’ve just started with Tap Forms and hoping it will replace Bento. So far I’ve just bought the Mac version, and have hit one problem:
I need to be able to filter by a date field, using date <= today. So whenever I open it, I can see entries with dates set to today or in the past. Is there a way to do that? I can only seem to set it to on or before a specific date.
Also, any idea when your next update will come? I’m on Mavericks so looking forward to that!
Many thanks,
Frank
Hi!
I am considering switching to TapForms from Bento. I have two questions:
I have also mp3 files in my database. Can I listen to these files directly in TapForms?
I am working with a project partner who should have access to my database. Does TapForms have the possibility to share? He needs only to be able to browse my database.
Thanks for your comments and help
best,
daniel
Will give it a try!
I do use Tap Forms on my Mac Pro, iPad & iPhone.
Definitely a richer product than Bento.
Am looking forward to v.2!
Thanks again!
…John
As always, thanks Brendan- Your reply time is amazing.
It was the same way in Bento. My wife and I used to share a DB and it was not dynamic. There had to be an action that required a screen refresh such as change to a diff form (library), or something like that. Might be worth giving it a try.
Thx.
Hey Bob- I’m a former Bento and Filemaker user and landed on TF. Filemaker was WAY too much work.
This may be more of a question for Brendan- Is it possible for two users to have 1 TF DB file open and work on it at the same time? I was thinking it would be easy to locally share a folder on OS X, put the TF database file in that shared folder, and then both people could work from that TF DB file.
Would this work?
After the death of Bento, I researched options very extensively. I assigned one of my employees to the task for 4 business days. He then presented the solutions to me, I experimented with the options, and landed on TF. You are correct, there is hole in the market. But synchronous multi-user DB access is quite advanced. Bento was quite unusual in its ability to do this.
Here’s something I noticed today, and couldn’t figure out for about an hour until it dawned on me…
I had a field called “Round-trip” and a field titled “Average Speed (kts)” (I’ve built a sailing log…)
I also have fields called “Start Date and Time” and “End Date and Time” and went to build a fairly standard End-Start calculation. BUT – as soon as I typed “-“, something in the auto-complete routine would always match the “Round-trip” field and insert it into the calculation formula box. Similarly, if I wanted to do a formula with parentheses, as soon as I typed “(” it would match my Average Speed (kts) field.
What I learned:
– The autocomplete mechanism, which only works on and off for me on my Mac, is really aggressive about matching ANY character in field names.
– Do not name your fields with anything used in algebraic expressions!
What I suggest:
– Tune the autocomplete in the formula box to search either the beginnings of field names, or just the alphabetic characters. Optionally, disallow standard mathematical operators from field naming.
Looking forward to seeing what Tap 2.0 looks like. I’ve only had the product for a few days, and I already don’t miss Bento at all. Hell, I didn’t miss Bento when it was active. Felt like a toy.
Hi, I’m trying to port a Bento (Mac) database to Tap Forms.
One field that on Bento displayed time in HH:SS format now is showing seconds (ex: 1800s instead of 30 minutes)
How can I make the field display the correct format?
Do I need to re-enter all the values?
Thanks
I think this might have been asked before, but I’m not exactly sure, so I figured I’d ask again, especially in regard to exactly what I’m hoping to be able to do.
First, I am a former Bento user who feels abandoned by apple and Filemaker. Used to have Filemaker a long time ago, but it’s just overkill for me.
Anyway, in Bento I used to be able to have a subfolder of specific records. I am a psychologist and director of a little clinic and used to have all the clients in a data base. Then I had a subfolder that contained just my clients. So I had a rule that if the ‘discharge date’ was empty, and ‘therapist” was me, then they would show up in the subfolder of just my current clients. It’s not enough to have my name since some of them were discharged, and it’s not enough to have them listed by therapists since again I won’t have a current list of open clients, just every client that was/is mine. In Tap Form I tried the ‘grouping records by field’ but it wasn’t sufficient so I’m hoping that there might be another way.
Thanks for your help.
Also, as a very side question, is there a way to get older versions of Tap Forms for Mac? I love Snow Leopard and refuse to upgrade, too many reasons to mention here, and I feel that older versions are being abandoned too quickly. (same with the iOS’s, now that I think about it- my phone is staying on iOS 6)
Thanks again.
Gregg.
Hello…
New user here. Bento automatically generated a “Date Created” and a “Date Modified” field for each record. Is there a way to duplicate this in Tap Forms?
Thanks!
Thank you,
The problem reported was mine and I must apologize.
i exported my data from Bento as a Numbers file since the Bento .csv export lost data. I then exported the data from Numbers to a .csv file format and then to TapForms. The result being a blank field if the import format was DATE. If the input format was TEXT the date appeared as correct, but was not a DATE field.
My problem was that I did not FORMAT the Date field in my numbers document – simple error since the dates looked OK in numbers, but they had to be formated as a date field for the proper transfer to TapForms. Once I did the proper formating everything worked properly.
Thanks, I did look at the Screen Casts but they have not helped. I can import the Bento data as ASCII without a problem. However, I want to add new records as I go along. If I use your Date Format for that field, all of the ASCII values are blank. I don’t want to go back to manually entering an ASCII date when a pop up exists. I have the same problem with any non ASCII field, e.g., If I used a checkmark in Bento it comes across to TF as a 0 or 1. If I then change the field in TF to checkmark I get a blanks for the ASCII data import. Same goes for Stars, etc.
I would appreciate any advice that you may have. As it stands now TF is of very little use to me.
Well, sure, things are indeed okay. Except for the problem listed in my other thread at
Inconsistent display of images
Encountering problems when first learning a new app can often be helpful as it gets you immersed into the little things.
Thanks for all your advice.
Thanks for this. With the Bento set-up for the desktops there’s no need to mount the host iMac drive. You just publish the databases (Bento calls them libraries) as shared on the local network. Then they magically appear on the Bento sidebar on the ‘client’ Macs’ and off you go. It’s also truly multi-user.
As for the iPads, we just load a copy of the data into them so that we can access (read) it when out of the office. I find it far too easy to accidentally change records by mistake on the touch screen so it’s one-way-sync only. It’s only for occasional use.
I’m weighing up the consequences of a third iCloud account just for Tap Forms. It has the added advantage off access to the data from anywhere with a network connection. However having to log in and out of the different iCloud accounts could prove to be a real pain. But I haven’t discounted it entirely.
I suppose I’m hoping that Google come along with a simple database that works on Google Drive. I shy away from Filemaker because I would be paying for a whole lot of functionality that we will never ever use. IMO there is one big gap in the market at the moment for a cloud based simple database solution that is multi-user.
