Anyway to Sort By Last Name of Contact?

[beagley]

The inclusion of “Contact” as an option is great, as it lets me use my existing contact database in iOS/MacOS/etc.

However, if I sort by “Contact” in the list view, it sorts by first name.

Any way to work around this?

[Brendan]

There’s no workaround for this at the moment. Perhaps it would be good if I added a Field Option on the Contact field type which asked you which way you’d like to copy in the contact name into Tap Forms. Tap Forms right now just takes the first and the last name and joins them together with a space in between. Then it stores that in its own database. That’s what’s used for sorting.

[hdevichi]

Hello,

I also think it would be a great addition to the application. I am using the tap forms as an enhanced contact database, and it would be very useful to keep the same sort as in the contacts app (which is more usual). Could you please consider it for a future release?

best regards,
H.

[Brendan]

Consider it considered :-)

Brendan

[Jules Mimeault]

I bought TaskForms for Mac less than an hour ago.
And this is one of the first features I need.
Unfortunately I only find now that this is not yet implemented.
More than a year after is has been considered, I hope there is a solution to come soon.
Now that I have entered my contacts in my TapForms database, isn’t there any workaround for this missing feature?

Besides that, I find TapForms a wonderful app.

[Brendan]

Hi Jules,

If you set the display order of your contact to Last Name first then Tap Forms will copy it in as is and this will affect sorting.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Jules Mimeault]

Hello,

Thanks for your quick answer.
But it doesn’t work… or as I’ll describe below, it works only partially.

1- When I change the display order of my contacts to Last Name First in the Preferences of my Contacts application, it changes also the display order of the contact field in TapForm, but it does not change the sort Order.
In my Contacts App, the Sort order is set to last name.
I tried the four combinations (the right ones and the wrong ones) of Display order and sort order in my Contacts application, and TapForms always sort the contacts by first name.

2- After that, I tried to enter new contacts, and those are properly sorted.
So to have them sorted properly, I have to delete and re-insert all my contacts in TapForms.

I hope you can do something about that.
Thanks for your help.

[Brendan]

Hi Jules,

Ah yes, I see that now. The problem is that Tap Forms only copies the name when you first select the contact. But when it goes to display the name, it uses an internal person ID from your contact database to lookup the contact and then it decides how to display that contact. So what’s stored and what’s displayed are actually different in this case.

The only way I can think of allowing the sort to change is to put a button on the Contact field that lets you choose the display order. Then Tap Forms would have to loop through all of your records and re-copy the first and last name according to your selected order. I’ll have to think about that since it’ll take a bit of work to do that. Otherwise, yes, you would have to re-select each contact.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Jules Mimeault]

Hello,

I found a more convenient workaround than re-select each contact.
I export all my contacts from my TapForms form, checking the options “Export Record ID” and “Field Type Tags”.
I import the exported file in the same TapForms form.
All my contacts are now properly sorted by Last Name.

The only thing that I have to reset is the Category, because while importing my form has been switched from its original category to “Uncategorized”.

Hope this can be useful to other.

[Author]

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