Search Results for 'script'

[Eddzo]

I love tapforms

I’m an Electrician and I would like to be able to make troubleshooting reports in the layout tool.

I would basically put my letterhead, contact info
Then below would be a series of images 3 across with descriptions of the issue.

I can accomplish this on the Mac, but it’s more free hand.
Can’t figure out how to place image holders from the form, it only uses one photo.

But if I use the camera button, I can add any image on my Mac…

Would be cool if we could automate it, just not sure how since all the images are in a container and there no way to tie a description to each image…. ?

Any idea.. ?
I can still make it happen but it’s not data coming from my database.
Still cool as hell none the less ????

[Brendan]

And the field title (Mac version only) will display the contents of that field description when you hover over it as a tooltip.

[scneophyte]

I have several join fields on most every form. In my design, I try to keep them all in a “Join Fields” section; however, there are time when it is better design to have them somewhere else. Now, in the description field, I can indicate if a field is a join field.

It is so helpful, thanks!

[sweejin]

Hi Brendon!

Thanks for the latest 5.2.5 update. It’s EXACTLY the two features that were on my mind the past few weeks; I had been thinking a lot that I wish I could collapse an entire section heading since my forms are so lengthy, and also I had wished for a description field so that my field titles needn’t be so wordy. Lo and behold, you added these features today, lol!

I would like to request a sub-section heading to the field type in a future update. I have many section headings in my forms, but a few are actually the main section heading while others are sub-section headings. Would it be possible to implement a sub-section heading, so that when I collapse the main section heading, every heading under that tree will collapse?

Thanks, really loving Tap Forms and the work you do!

Best,

Swee Jin

[Dave]

Great! I actually found a similar script, but it worked. One more quick question… if I import a field that contains number values from 1 to 10, can I import that data into a Ratings field?

[Brendan]

Well, there’s no scripting functionality in Tap Forms right now, but you can add a Website field to any form and there’s a button there which will open the URL when you click on it.

And if you put a field name within square brackets, Tap Forms will substitute that value into the URL.

So you could create a Website field that has a Default Value set to something like:

http://www.somewebsite.com/someaction/[Serial Number]

Then when you click on the website button next to the Website field, Tap Forms will substitute the value from the Serial Number field. So that’s a way of having a dynamically generated URL.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks!

Brendan

[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