Search Results for 'script'

[Sydney Sauber]

Hi All, As always, Mike has clear, implementable solutions. Brendan, I second the request for a description field on the Pick Lists, and one for the Forms, too.

My work around for tracking which values got to which picklists and which permutations in a slightly different pick list go with which Forms, is so time consuming and cumbersome, because slight changes (as the iterative process refines the form) are complicated to maintain and document. The description field in picklists (and forms) would help a lot!!!! Daylite has something like what we are requesting if you are looking for an example.

Thanks
Sydney

[tonyt]

Hi
In full screen mode the search icon for saved searches is all jumbled up with the descriptive text for that search?
Cheers

[Kyle Jeremy]

Hello! We were former Bento users who finally bit the bullet to upgrade and we are thrilled with Tap Forms so far. We use it to enter in simple records of objects with date/time/description. While we have a small number of records (about 2600) they all have 1 high-resolution photo attached making the database just north of 2GB.

I created a CouchDB server and can sync between two MacBook Airs without issue, the trouble is with the 1 iPhone we’re trying to sync- for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get the initial database on there!?

I’ve tried putting it in iCloud, Dropbox, etc., but when I go to try and “import a backup” from the iOS app, it sort of does nothing and no file name is listed in the field, even though I can see the 2GB file in both Dropbox and iCloud. (And marked the file for “offline” so it was already downloaded.)

I’ve tried using the “-> send to” device button and it starts to work, but typically times out after about 5-10 minutes.

Any thoughts on what I can do so that I can have the same database ID on my iPhone to connect it to the CouchDB for syncing? Maybe I could make a version of the database and strip out all the photos or something to shrink it down?

Many thanks for any advice and a great overall product.

[Mike Schwartz]

You’re quite welcome; I was afraid it might be TLDR for a lot of people. Feel free to incorporate any of it you want in your documentation updates. Just to quickly reiterate points/suggestions addressed at you:

1. Expansion of the POS(A,X) function to POS(A,X,Y), where Y represents the starting number for the search. Not high priority, but potentially useful.
2. Operation of the POS(A,X) function in the context of right-to-left language localizations (if any).
3. Formula sheet description for LEFT(A,X) function: It would be more natural to say either “the left-most X characters” or “the X left-most characters” rather than “the left X most characters”. Try saying all three out loud, substituting the spoken word “seven” for “X”. :)
4. Same nit for the description of RIGHT(A,X).
5. Tough one: finding a way to allow a comma to appear within a function argument, even though commas are used to delimit the arguments. I could imagine maybe using a backslash as an escape character, so if \, appears in a function, the parser knows that the comma is not a delimiter. Or maybe it could interpret a backslash followed by an ASCII code: \44 means a comma as an argument, not a delimiter.

Thanks,
Mike

[Mike Schwartz]

With the release of Tap Forms 5.2.2, there are new Text functions available for Calculation Fields. I’ve played around with them a little bit, and thought it might be helpful to share some of the things I’ve found out about them and to provide an example that might be useful.

FUNCTION DESCRIPTIONS AND COMMENTS

Here are the new text functions. In the formula arguments, note that A and B represent text strings, while X represents a numerical value. Arguments can be constants, references to other fields, or expressions that evaluate to a text string or number, as needed. Initial descriptions are quoted from the Tap Forms “Edit Formula” sheet:

POS(A,B) — “Returns the position of B within the text A.”
Details: The returned value is an integer, so make sure to set the Result Type to Number, otherwise it won’t work. Note that it is the first occurrence of the search string that is reported.
Example: POS(“Hello123Hello456”,””o”) returns the numerical value 5, meaning that “o” was found at the fifth position of the input string.
Comment 1: An enhancement to this function would be to include a third argument that would be a start value for the search. So, for example, POS(“Hello123Hello456”,”Hello”,3) would return the value 9, since that is the first position where the full string “Hello” is found, beginning the search from the third character onward.
Comment 2: If Tap Forms is localized for any right-to-left languages, will this function scan the string and count characters from right to left?
Error Behaviours: If the search string is not found, the function returns NULL, not the number zero. I’m not suggesting it should be one way or the other, just reporting how it works.

LEFT(A,X) — “Returns the left-most X characters from the text A.” (I cleaned up the description a little bit).
Details: The returned value is a text string, so make sure to set the Result Type to Text, otherwise it won’t work.
Example: LEFT(“Hello123Hello456”,6) returns the text string “Hello1”.
Error Behaviours: The argument X would normally be an integer between the values of 1 and the full length_of_string. The function returns the following results for abnormal arguments: If X=<0, it returns the NULL value. If X has a decimal part, the decimal part is ignored. So X=5.9 will result in the left-most 5 characters being returned, same as X=5. If X > length_of_string, then the entire string is returned.

RIGHT(A,X) — “Returns the right-most X characters from the text A.” (I cleaned up the description a little bit).
Details: The returned value is a text string, so make sure to set the Result Type to Text, otherwise it won’t work.
Example: RIGHT(“Hello123Hello456”,6) returns the text string “llo456”.
Error Behaviours: (same behaviours as for LEFT(A,X)

WORKING EXAMPLE

This example assumes that you are importing name data from another source, and the values come in the format of LastName+FirstName. I know, the most likely delimiter would be a comma, not a plus sign, but bear with me. Your goal is to process the LastName+FirstName field to product two calculation fields: First Name and Last Name. So if your text field contains the value “O’Connor+Sinead”, then First Name would show “Sinead” and the Last Name would show “O’Connor”.

Last Name: This one is easier. The approach is to find the position of the “+” sign, call it N. Then the Last Name is simply the first N-1 characters of LastName+FirstName. The formula is LEFT(LastName+FirstName,POS(LastName+FirstName,”+”)-1). Result Type is Text.

First Name: This one is slightly more involved. If the “+” sign is at position N, then the First Name occupies the right-most K characters, where K equals the full length of the LastName+FirstName string minus N. The formula is RIGHT(LastName+FirstName,LENGTH(LastName+FirstName)-POS(LastName+FirstName,”+”)). Result Type is Text.

Comment: Okay, so why did I use the “+” sign in this example instead of a comma? Because it doesn’t work with a comma. Commas are used as delimiters within the Tap Forms functions, so if you try to insert a text argument of “,” then it fools the parser into thinking that there are too many arguments and the whole function fails. Believe me, I tried to make it work. I tried adding a separate text field named “Comma” with the value “,” and referencing that field in the name formulas. No dice. I also hoped that Tap Forms might recognize the CHAR(X) function, which returns the character associated with the ASCII value X (the ASCII code for a comma is 44). So I tried replacing “,” with CHAR(44), but also no joy. So until such time when we can ESCAPE a comma value in a function, the approach to this problem would be first to massage the source data in a word processor or spreadsheet to replace the comma character with a plus sign, then import the data into Tap Forms.

I hope that the above information and example will be useful in your applying these functions to your own forms.

— Mike

[Mike Schwartz]

Jose,

Good news! With the release of Tap Forms 5.2.2, there are some new text functions that can help with your use case until such time as Brendan might implement a dual-value (code/description) pick list. I’ll restate my understanding of the requirements:

REQUIREMENTS

1. Select field values from a pick list.
2. The pick list will display both a “short code” and a verbose description as needed.
3. The short codes may not all be the same length.
4. The multi-column list view can cleanly display just the short codes in one of its columns.

SETUP

Here’s an example with two pick list values for “TEXTFIELD1”. Each pick list value has a standard structure: shortcode-space-dash-space-description:

first pick list value: ABC – DescriptionOfWhatABCmeans
second pick list value: VWXYZ – DescriptionOfWhatVWXYZmeans

APPROACH

The goal is to peel off the initial shortcode from TEXTFIELD1, regardless of its length, and have that be the value of a calculation field, SHORTCODE. The approach is to use the new TEXT functions to (1) find the location of the “dash”, (2) calculate the length “N” of the shortcode (it’s the position of the “dash” minus two), and finally (3) set the value of SHORTCODE to the first N characters of TEXTFIELD1.

SOLUTION

The following formula for the SHORTCODE calculation field will accomplish the above:

LEFT(TEXTFIELD1,POS(TEXTFIELD1,"-")-2)

Remember to set the Result Type to Text. Obviously, your short codes cannot themselves contain a “dash” character. But if you really want dashes in your short codes, you could separate the short code and description by something else, maybe space-equals-space instead of space-dash-space.

Then in your multi-column view you would display the SHORTCODE field but not the TEXTFIELD1 field.

Hope that helps,
Mike

[Mike Schwartz]

Brendan,

Please consider adding a FIND function like the one in Excel:

FIND(find_text,within_text,start_num), which returns the numeric position of the found text.

I was thinking about a solution/workaround to Jose’s use case in another thread (Pick Lists Request). I had suggested that he create a set of pick list values that start with a short code followed by a verbose description, and then to shorten his column width in multi-column view to display only the initial short codes. He responded that his short codes would be varying lengths, meaning that the display wouldn’t look clean. I suppose he could pad out the shorter short codes with spaces, but I was thinking of a different approach.

That approach would be to use a calculation field to return just the initial CODE portion of the lengthy CODE_space_dash_space_VerboseDescription field. Easy to do with the SUBSTR function, assuming that you know the position of the “dash”. Hence the notion of adding a FIND function.

I think it would have a lot of general utility for string manipulations. I’m not at all advocating this as an alternative to Jose’s request; just something else to think about adding.

Thanks,
Mike

[Brendan]

Ya, it would be useful to have the code and a description. It would be most useful if you had it for Number fields because you could have some textual description of what the number value means. Selecting it would only put the number value into the field, but you would get to see what that number value represented.

[Mike Schwartz]

Jose,

Would it work to construct your pick list to contain both an initial code and a verbose description? For example:

IOU — flag that I owe someone money, who should be paid soon
DUE — flag that someone owes me money

If your codes are all three characters, then you can set the column width to show only the codes, but when you click on the pick list arrow you’ll see the full description.

As an alternative quick-and-dirty work-around, you can add a custom layout and call it “Pick List Values”. On that layout, you can add a table of pick list codes and descriptions as a static text item (NOT a field). Then you can flip to that layout and use it to jog your memory when needed.

— Mike

[Jose Monteiro]

Hi Brendan,

With pick lists, sometimes, or many times, it’s difficult to find a short description for the pick list value, allowing us to understand their meaning promptly.

Then we have longer descriptions, meaning wider columns on Multi-Column Views (thats my favorite view) and the need for moving view content left-right to view all data.

To overcome that I use codes on pick lists to reduce columns width.
With the growing number of Documents, Forms and Pick Lists it’s hard to remember all those codes and their meaning.

My suggestion is:
– Allow two fields on a pick list; one for a code and the other for a description.
– Then, when on a form choosing a code value for a field from a pick list, the popover window would show us the available codes and descriptions allowing us to choose the one we want.

Jose

[Leo]

You can use linked forms many 2 many. This way you can search on item # or description.
Then use calculation field to populate it with the chosen child/father

[Efren Santos]

Hi,

I am creating a sales order receipt, and wanted to show automatically the description by just typing or pluggin in the item # in Item field, If I type “FT01” it will automatically display “Dasilog” in the Description Field, the how can I do that?.

Qty Item # Description
1 FT01 Dasilog
3 FT05 Tasilog

Thanks.

BTW, I am still using the OLD Version of TF.

[Brendan]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your detailed description of what you’re trying to accomplish with Tap Forms.

Tap Forms is sharing the .tfarc file just for that specific record when you use it at the record details level. It was a convenient way of sharing everything there was to share about that record, including file attachments, photos, etc.

By the way, a .tfarc file is just a zipped file which contains a data.json file. The .zip extension is renamed to .tfarc so that Tap Forms recognizes it as a Tap Forms Archive file. The data.json file has all of your data in it for all the records in the form.

So if Pythonista can unzip the file and then process a .json document, then you could theoretically get the data that you want from that Share panel.

It is a bit tricky deciding what type of data to share. In the case of sharing a CSV file with just one record, what about any file attachments and photos you might have in that record? Do they get ignored or do I create a separate zip file that contains all of those things? What if there are Link to Form fields in that record? Do I then export those too? The .tfarc file answere all those questions for me.

I’m definitely interested in helping to make this process easier for you though. One possibility would be when you tap the Share button, I then ask the user what format to share the record in (CSV or Archive).

[Steve Morris]

I use tap forms regularly. I have several applications but the main one is collecting data to help me manage my diabetes. As a basic data base it is working well, especially with the enhanced search. The one thing I wish I could do easier is share data outside of tap forms. For example sometimes I want to send some data to my doctor. Also I use the Pythonista app a lot. Pythonista is Python integrated with ios so i write a lot of scripts. I would like to write Python scripts to analyze my diabetes data. To do that I would like to send the data I just entered to a script which then looks through recent history and gives me advice. Python is heavily used in the science world for numerical analysis. Pythonista includes the core data processing and plotting libraries used for this (Numpy etc.) I would like to use this capability to analyze the data I collect in Tap Forms. The two apps seems like a perfect fit to me.The best iOS database app connected to the only usefull and fully functional scripting language that runs on iOS.

Tap Forms is close. I have saved a cvs file down in the files menu then shared it. (I can put my Pythinista scripts in the Apple Share menu.) However in Tap Forms this process is so tedious. I counted and the process of sharing csv data has seven steps and that doesn’t include managing the now useless files. So I did it once, plotted my blood sugar data and never did it again. It is worth doing once in a while but I want something I could do almost every time I enter data.

However I recently noticed that that when I select a record there is a share button. I was very excited. That is only two clicks away from the record. Today I decided it was time to get back to writing some scripts. I started with my demo share script at that just captures the data. The shared data was a large tfarc file presumably containing the entire dataset. It is big enough. What the heck am I supposed to do with a tfarc file when I asked to share a specific record? This makes no sense to me. If I understand what a tfarc does it should only be shared when you are in a global context, not when you are looking at a single record.

Major disappointment. Not what I was hoping. I still don’t have a convenient way to share data with my doctor and write scripts to help manage my diabetes. tfarc is only interesting to Tap Forms. My doctor doesn’t use Tap Forms (she can open .csv files) and I don’t know how to unpack a tfarc in in Python.

A request. The share functionality can share more than one file at a time. It is common to share data in multiple formats for use by different apps letting the app choose between the different kind of files. For example text files could be shared as raw text, markup and html. Could Tap Forms share both a tfarc and a csv file at these share menus? That should be backwards compatible.

Ideally there should be 3 ways to share a data set depending on were the user selects share.

1) At the record level the shared csv should contain that record.
2) In the search function the shared csv file should contain the selected records of the search.
3) At the top level the shared csv file should contain the entire data set.

Tap Forms is so close to what I need. I’m convinced that a close binding between Tap Forms and Pythonista scripting would get you a completely new source of customers. There is a whole world of scientists out there (and anyone else with large datasets to process) using Python to interact with databases.

[Steve Morris]

BTY: Thanks for the search update in version 5. It is spectacular. It is very powerful. I use it extensively. If only I could figure out how to delete a search I no longer need.

For the last two weeks I have been trying to figure out how to add a field to an existing form. I went through every screen and touched every button and couldn’t find anything. I use Tap Forms every day but mostly the same form. (I’m diabetic and log a bunch of stuff every day.) The result is I knw a lot about entering data to that form but noot much else. It has been a long time since I edited a form so I blamed my memory. I googled the question and eventually found that it was supposed to be under tools. It isn’t there.

Why isn’t it there? I searched some more and found a note about “hidden” forms (which I have never used because I can’t figure out why I would want to hide my stuff from myself) and a description about how to get to customize from a record detail->share. I didn’t think my form was hidden but who knows what I might have done by accident so I gave it a try. Sure enough I was finally able to add my field. While i was there I checked the hidden attribute. It is Off! Come to think of it it shows up in the regular forms menu so how could it be hidden?

So why no Customize in the tools menu?

Confused.

-steve