How do you find the average of the numbers in several fields???
I have several complex scripts in Filemaker, which I find cannot be done in Tap Forms such as inputting a message into a field IF a number in a field is < or > than a certain number or IF an average number is too far off from other average numbers in other fields of averages. From what I can tell, this cannot be done and it’s back to Filemaker.
Let’s just start with finding an AVERAGE. I would like to find the average of numbers in several fields; but only IF there is a number in each field.
ie – the AVERAGE of 100 fields containing 5, blank, 4,4,3,5, blank, blank, blank, blank… is 4.2 (the blank fields don’t count as ‘0’)
How can this be done????
Hi Brendan,
Firstly – as a new user – many thanks for your obvious hard work and dedication to creating and maintaining this software.
My question is this: I’m trying to create an Invoice for customers.
I have used the “Call Log” Form and inserted this into my “Customers” Form.
I have also created an “Invoice” Form within my “Customers” Form.
I would like to keep track of all my calls here and bill directly from this.
My question is: can I pull the SUM of time from the “Call Log” and insert this into the “Invoice” Form and then apply a calculation based on a monetary amount? (e.g.: 1:30 hours x €50 =) so this appears on my invoice?
As a secondary question – is it possible on a Form to put a blank, fillable text field (e.g.: Description of Work) that is not pulled from elsewhere (or doesn’t appear on the Default Layout)?
Everyone apologises hoping they haven’t asked an already answered query (or just a dumb questions)… so, I also apologise!
Many thanks,
Chris Reina
Brendan,
Do you ever plan to support the now standard app extensions format for export on iOS? I’m asking specifically because you can write simple app extensions in python using the pythonista app. That’s particularly interesting to me because pythonista supports quite a few graphics and plotting packages. Several of my forms are for tracking numeric things like weight and blood sugar (I’m a diabetic) where the most useful way to look at it is in a plot. I would like to create multiple simple extensions to show the data in various formats or to do calculations that are not convenient in TF like show the averages of measurements at different times of the day. I know I can export the csv file to the shared area then switch to python, find the script I want to run, tell it which file to use etc but it would be very nice to skip those steps launch the extensions directly from TF especially when I just want a quick look. It seem like the combination of TF as a front end to capture data and extensions (including pythonista extensions) to do fancy processing would be a powerful combination.
Since it is the standard I was sort of expecting this to be there already and was a little disappointed when I bought TF and discovered that the standard share icon didn’t pop up the standard iOS share dialog with its ability to add arbitrary extensions that are prepared to handle the data format. Not too disappointed (TF is too nice in so many other ways) but it would be nice.
-steve (aka zencuke)
Sorry, I should’ve been a bit more descriptive.
Allow me to go back to my previous example with 100 records, and let’s assume the following creation date distribution:
records 1-80: All created on the 1st of June 2014
records 80-100: Created in one day intervals starting 20 days ago
Now the problem is that then the date Table Index displayed on the right is laid out so that 80% of the space (20 days) is dedicated to the last 20 records, while the first 80 records are almost impossible to scroll through using the Table Index because they are all crammed into a tiny space.
Visually this would look like:
| June 2014 |
| October 2015 |
| October 2015 |
| October 2015 |
| October 2015 |
| November 2015 |
| November 2015 |
…
If, however one could use that “creation index” (by that I mean the ordinal by which is created, i.e. the “row number” on a spreadsheet) to map to the Table Index instead of the date, then I would get a linear Table Index based on the number of entries, but still sorted by their creation date. So then the 80 records created all on the 1st of June 2014 would take 80% of the Table Index height:
| 10 |
| 20 |
| 30 |
| 40 |
| 50 |
| 60 |
| 70 |
| 80 |
| 90 |
| 100 |
Let me know if you still have questions, and thanks for your interest in any case!
Thanks,
czuch
Hi Brendan
Thanks for the quick response. Are you able to confirm if the move to the new database engine will be a free update ? I realise that a major new version may require a new subscription but I am concerned that the product needs to be able to handle a few thousand records so would not want to have to pay for an upgrade for just that database engine migration or are the 2 things linked ?
Thanks again
Andrew
So you could have several fabrics, of different types, colors, lengths, etc… For the most part, I’d guess that it’s fairly specific to the pattern. It sounds like that could be accommodated with a link to another form, one to many, and hidden from the usual display. Let’s call that form “Fabrics.” You could add as many or as few records for fabrics to a single pattern, for each pattern.
With a fabrics form, linked to your patterns, you could specify a description, length, cost per yard, number of yards, and a calculated cost for each fabric. The sum of the fabric costs could be shown on the main pattern form, with a “tokenize” function.
The fabrics would have to be entered manually, unless someone has a more clever idea to import records into the fabrics form and associate them to patters, one to many.
Does this help?
Hi Judy,
If by barcodes you mean Universal Product Codes (UPCs), then you wouldn’t get much more than the product name. Still, you could search off of a product code to see if you have it in the database. It’s possible to get all of the UPC information available (outside of TapForms) for any codes you have and use it as an import file. This would help you identify if you already have the pattern. There is a UPC lookup website where you could enter a few codes and see if it is descriptive enough for your needs. If you decide that you need hundreds of codes processed that way, let me know.
Any fabric info would have to be entered in or associated for each item. I would only add that kind of detail as needed.
I’d like to know more about what you’ve tried so far and see if I can help. Have you contacted the person who posted the recommendation on the sewing blog? Perhaps you could get them to export a template for the structure they use.
It’s not working for me.
I imported my credit card statement. It’s very simple.
These are fields:
Name And Type
1. Date – Date
2. Card # – text
3. Description – Note
4. Debit – Number
5. Credit – Number
My form has a calculation set to the field debit
Both Debit and Credit has summary calculations set to total.
I saved a search where the field credit is set as not empty so the resulting list is that of all my credits.
I’d like to see a total of just those records. Instead the search result list still shows debit at the bottom with a total of $0.00
What aren’t I doing?
I know it should be simple!
Thanks
Yvette
Hi Doug,
Which version of Tap Forms are you using? Mac or iOS?
On the Mac version you can access it with the following menu command:
Layout > Font > Baseline > Subscript/Superscript
It’s not available on iOS.
Thanks,
Brendan
Is there a way to include subscript and superscript? For example the scientific forumla for dihydrogen monoxide (water) is H20. It would be great to have the 2 a subscript.
Hi, I’m a new user… I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, or changed something in a particular record somehow…
I have a form with several fields, one of which is a text field called “description” with no pick lists. I have a record that doesn’t return when I think it should… the description says “Spiderwebs”, and no portion of that word returns that record. Other descriptions seem to work as expected, but I only have 30 or so records, so it’s hard to test well…
Why would a particular record not return with a search?
Hello Tapformers,
Ok so I just downloaded Tapforms for IPad and need some help getting set up.
The main form I am using is an inventory with these fields
1. Photo
2. Description
3. Product category
4. Retail price
5. Purchase location
6. Purchase date
7. Sold Y/N
8. Cost price
9. Profit (retail price minus cost price)
I would like to use another form that refers to the inventory form to calculate things like
1. Total profit of sold items
2. Cost price of unsold inventory
3. Average profit percentage
4. Total unsold inventory
How do I go about setting up a form to calculate this information?
Perhaps in the advanced calculation field?
Since I struggled with the similar sync problems I post my ‘solution’: I found out that on my Macbook (10.10.3) there is a difference between two folders that are being used by dropbox and tap forms. One folder is hidden in the Library (Bibliotheek), one is the regular DropBox folder. They seem not to be in sync on the local harddisk and therefore also not in sync online. So it might be that TapForms is using the wrong directory (and also missing the sync files of the other devices!) or DropBox is missing out the hidden folder. When manually (or with a script) merging these two folders everything is working fine.
Hope this helps
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It would be great to be able to keep iCloud Drive and Dropbox as options, and who knows, maybe I can swing that, but iCloud Drive and Dropbox are fundamentally just folders on the Internet that contain files. They know nothing about the logic behind syncing. With Couchbase, there is a syncing protocol built-in to it which requires both end points to understand that protocol. It’s like two people needing to know the same language in order to communicate effectively.
99% of my email support requests are about people not being able to get Dropbox or iCloud communicating properly. Once it’s all working it’s generally fine, but there are also some things you have to be careful of when managing your syncing. That’s what I’m hoping to solve with the move to Couchbase. Since it’s a database engine that has built-in sync, it should effectively be a turn it on and forget it affair. I’ve done some experimenting with their sample apps and it’s great to be able to check a box on one device and see that box checked a few seconds later on the other device without me having to do anything more than that.
That’s my goal for Tap Forms.
I realize nobody wants to have to pay for anything more than the base cost of the app once and never again after that, but if a cloud based service ends up costing me money to operate, then I will have no choice but to pass that on to the customer. Imagine me having to pay more to keep the service running than what I earn from only new sales? I’d quickly go out of business and Tap Forms would cease to exist. I don’t want that and I know you don’t want that.
I may eventually be able to allow you to connect to your own instance of the Couchbase sync gateway that’s connected to your own Couchbase server. This would be great for small businesses that want to sync the devices to their own server. A paid subscription would only be required if someone either didn’t want to sync via WiFi and couldn’t run their own sync gateway/server.
Syncing via WiFi is great also because I know a bunch of customers use Tap Forms in the field (for example on archeological digs) and being able to sync over an ad-hoc WiFi network would be great for them. They don’t always have access to the Internet wherever they are. Couchbase is even flexible enough to allow some devices to sync via WiFi and some via WiFi and the cloud. So those devices syncing only on WiFi will eventually get the data in the cloud too when the device that’s syncing with both are updated. Now that’ll take a lot of time and testing to see if I can get that to work and probably wouldn’t be a feature right out of the gate. It’ll all take time.
And here’s another issue I’ve been faced with. The moment I released the update to support Dropbox sync, I got a notice from Dropbox that said they’re discontinuing support for the Dropbox Sync API. Of all the things… I worked for months to add Dropbox sync, only to discover that they no longer support it the moment I release it to production. It won’t cease to function they said, but they won’t be bringing out any further updates to it anymore. So I’m kind of forced to move on from that.
So that’s that for now :-)
Thanks,
Brendan
I’m just working on the data migration code at the moment. Once I get that done, then I can see if I can get Tap Forms to read the data from the database and display it on screen. Converting all the Saved Searches to a new search mechanism is going to be a super hard challenge because Couchbase does searching totally different than SQLite. But the great thing about Couchbase Mobile is that the sync is just built-in, either via a cloud service or via peer-to-peer WiFi. I haven’t decided about the cloud service to use yet though. There are many options. But it won’t be Dropbox or iCloud. It’ll either be something like http://www.cloudant.com or me setting up a Couchbase Server service on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services or something like that. And that’ll cost me money to run, so cloud sync may become a subscription service. Peer-to-peer WiFi sync would be free.
If you think about what iCloud Drive and Dropbox are, they are just file servers in the cloud. They simply store the files that Tap Forms writes. All syncing is done via the client. But with Couchbase, there must be an actual database server and sync gateway in the cloud that manages the syncing process from all the devices. But that’s the great thing about it, since the database in the cloud becomes the “source of truth”. It will also mean less storage space is consumed by Tap Forms on your devices.
It’s still in the development and proof of concept stages. I’ve got the code mostly written to migrate the database. Still a bit more work to do on that plus migrate all the saved searches. That’s the biggest challenge really.
But the fun never ends developing Tap Forms! :)
Thanks,
Brendan
