Search Results for 'script'

[captain]

Hi there, been a very satisfied user of TapForms so far, brilliant stuff, allowed me to organise my repair-business fantastically.

I have created a good database that allows me to store customer’s details and the machines’ details they hand in for repair.
I work a lot with serial numbers of computers, and it would be very nice if I could create a button that opens up a script (that, in turn runs a certain URL to do a lookup on a serialnumber).

Is there a way to achieve this?

So basically, I would like to have a button that takes a value from a Field (‘serialnumber’), and uses that value to run a script.

much obliged

[Brendan]

Hi Jose,

See the online manual for a description of those options:

https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5/en/topic/pick-lists

Thanks,

Brendan

[Chris Knight]

I bet Apple would say Swift. I have not used it myself yet. When it was first released I started to read up on it but decided it needed to have more time before I was going to learn it and see if the promise of cross-platform programming actually went anywhere.

I would personally vote for a subset of Python that includes only what would be applicable and useful in TapForms. There are slimmed down versions that are pretty small like MicroPython but it is aimed at embedded development on micro controllers. But, Python is probably the easiest language I ever learned to actually get doing useful things with quickly, even if the Python fan community is pretty vocally opinionated. It can be embedded in applications as a scripting language https://docs.python.org/3.6/extending/embedding.html and it can be slimmed way way down to a single 11MB file, https://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/ . Actually, it can be even smaller by taking out a lot of the stuff that wouldn’t be needed. I’ve seen a python fit in 64k. Yep, 64k !!! Because micro controllers don’t usually have a lot of memory on chip it is important in that environment to make it small. MicroPython is current and needs a whopping 256k. That still isn’t a lot of memory for everything it can do.

The idea of having a “real” interpreted scripting language to manipulate field data with is pretty super dreamy cool. Especially conditional decision making statements. But there are plenty of other things I find more pressing for myself. Field properties for example.

[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.