Bento smart collections and linked forms

[Tony Wilhelmsson]

Recently bought a new Mac and got Catalina and thus 64-bit only which then of course forces me to migrate from Bento. So I ended up with buying Tapforms and so far so good.
However I found a small snag when exporting and importing my Bento database. I have a Bento collection with Persons that can have roles. Then I used smart collection to get a collection of person for each Role. This I understand I can get with saved filters/queries. What I have used the smart collections for is to link a second collection “Interaction” where role “A” interacts with role “B”. Basically the second collection had two many to many relationships with the Person collection through smart collections.
So after the import smart collection was turned into empty forms. These forms where linked to the Interaction form.
So the “Person” form shows correctly the linked “Interactions” but the “Interaction” have two linked lists fields to empty forms with the role Names (the names of the Smart collections). Basically I try to figure out how to replace these with new List fields that correctly links back to the Person forms.

[Brendan]

Hi Tony,

So if I understand correctly, in Bento you were able to link a Smart Collection directly? I guess I wasn’t aware that you could do that. I don’ have a feature in Tap Forms that lets you connect directly to Saved Searches on a Link to Form field. You can only connect to forms themselves.

In Bento, did the links happen automatically? Or did you manually selected the child records to link to? When you did that, was it a Smart Collection of records that was presented to choose from?

If you have a common field between your parent and child forms, you could also have Tap Forms use the Join Link Type to link the forms together. That way Tap Forms will establish the relationship automatically.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Tony Wilhelmsson]

Well, seems that Bento not really differentiated between Collection and Smart Collection.
When it comes to common field between the two Forms there is no explicit filed to identify the relationship created by me. Since the form for “Persons” do list related “Interaction” records I guess there is an implicit ID-field anyway.
Maybe there is a possibility to add a (or two) List on “Interaction” form linked to “Persons” and have it filtered based on Role?

[Sam Moffatt]

In Tap Forms, a Link to Form field will internally store the metadata from you connecting everything together. Presumably somewhere in Bento there is a mapping from a given record to other records.

The “Related Data” to “Smart Collection” functionality appears to be more or less a saved search, so it’d be about using a Saved Search as a search source instead of a form. I played in Bento with this a little and noticed it only let me select records from the smart collection and I couldn’t add a new one. Implementing the equivalent this as a Link to Form -> Saved Search seems like it’d be plausible.

The “Related Data” to “Collection” functionality actually looks like it might be a little more interesting. The collection is an explicit subset of records in a Bento Library. What you could do to model this is to create a new pick list in the document preferences (Tap Forms > Preferences > Lists > Pick Lists) and in it put your “Collection” names. Since records can be in multiple collections, set the “Display As” for the pick list as “multi-value popover”. Then add a new “Collection” field to the record and link it to the “Collection” names pick list at the bottom of the field parameters. Then from there you can use Saved Searches to replicate the collection functionality from Bento. The gotcha here is that if your collection names overlaps (e.g. “Teacher” and “Teacher’s Assistant” as roles) then this won’t work properly, so all of the names need to be unique and not contain parts of others (e.g. “Teacher” is in “Teacher’s Assistant”).

Right now I think that is the closest you can get to Bento’s behaviour without at least the support of having Saved Searches as a Link to Form target (which I think would be cool!).

Tangentially I’d like to see a “tag” field type where I could have properly delimited tag bubbles instead of full free form text. Then this could be tied to the multi-value popover as well and in the saved search an exact match on tag name. This would solve the partial match problem on the saved search listed above.

[Tony Wilhelmsson]

Thanks, I got it solved in a working manner.
And learned a lot on the way.

[Author]

Posts