Calculation between two linked forms

[Antoine Flap]

Hi Brendan,

Great work!
I’ve been trying to make some calculations in a child form with values fetched and totaled from a parent form, to no avail…
What I’m trying to do :

I have a parent form witch lists all the housings I have on sale. Each of them has a different price.
My child form needs to calculate ratios from the total of all these prices…

Don’t know if that is really clear.

thanks in advance for your answer!

Cheers

Antoine

[Brendan]

Hi Antoine,

Child forms don’t have access to the fields from their parent, so you won’t be able to create a formula in a Calculation field which references fields in the parent. Nor can parent forms reference the fields from child forms. A form can only reference the fields of itself. I’m very sorry for that.

Thanks

Brendan

[Grey Drane]

Is this something that may be possible in the future?

I ask because I’m trying to build a project tracking and billing database. I have a client form, a project form (one-to-many child of Clients), and a task form (one-to-many child of Projects). I’d ideally like to send “multi-project” invoices to my clients at the end of each month (directly from Tap Forms), but maybe this isn’t going to be possible without the ability to total the task values into the Projects form (and then calculate the sum of the project totals)?

Or is there some other solution/workaround?

Cheers,
Grey

[Brendan]

Hi Grey,

There’s no workaround other than to do it manually by adding a separate field to your parent form. Then you could just copy the total from the bottom of the Link to Form field.

But it’s definitely something I want to do to enhance the Calculation engine. Something like [Child Form:Total(Amount)]. Don’t try this though. It’s just a though and hasn’t been implemented.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Grey Drane]

OK, thanks. I’ll play around with it a bit and see what solution I can come up with. I may end up exporting the data for invoicing, though.

Cheers,
Grey

[Vladimir Glazunov]

Hi, Brendan,
Impossibility of exchanging data between forms is a real trouble in building database with a few financial calculations ((( I have finished the structure of my base in 30 minutes (it’s really very easy!!!), all movement of clients, contracts, linked payments and rewards are working, but I can’t calculate accepted or estimated payments for selected contract or seller ( May be you have seen such structure before and have idea how can I solve this problem?

Sincerely, Vladimir

[Brendan]

Hi Vladimir,

The best you can get is to display a calculation at the bottom of the list of records (including linked records). You do that by setting the Calculation Type field property for all the fields that you want to show that calculation for.

So if you were displaying a seller and you saw their list of contracts, then you could have Tap Forms display a total of all the contracts just for that seller.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Dominique PIERRE]

Brendan,

you mentioned

“Child forms don’t have access to the fields from their parent, so you won’t be able to create a formula in a Calculation field which references fields in the parent. Nor can parent forms reference the fields from child forms. A form can only reference the fields of itself. I’m very sorry for that.
But it’s definitely something I want to do to enhance the Calculation engine. Something like [Child Form:Total(Amount)]. Don’t try this though. It’s just a though and hasn’t been implemented.”

I just decided to start switching from Bento to Tap Forms, which I find interesting. But the ability to access to the content of any field in a linked form is really needed. It s very very convenient for proceeding with calculation taking into account values that are located in the liked form, or to automatically assign content to fields, using information from the linked form.

You mentioned that this is something you definitely want to do. Would you have any idea about when this could be available.

Thanks for your answer.

[Brendan]

Hi Dominique,

I do not. Sorry. I’m currently very busy working on Dropbox sync at the moment and haven’t been able to look into this yet.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Dominique Delcomminette]

Hi,

I will second this feature request. Would be wonderful for invoicing, and a lot of reports.

[Fabien Espic]

Hi Brendan,

I would be very interested by this feature. Do you have time to make any progress?

Regards,
Fabien

[Brendan]

Hi Fabien,

No, I haven’t had time to work on this. After my big work on adding the Dropbox Sync API to Tap Forms, Dropbox decided to deprecate the Dropbox Sync API, so I’ve been working on a big migration to Couchbase. It has touched every part of Tap Forms and is a very big job for me. But I’m making great progress on that at the moment. I just haven’t had the time to enhance the Calculation engine with this ability yet.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Ronlangara]

Hi Brendan
Just another vote for the need to add calculated field capability between parent:child forms as soon as possible.

Regards,
Ron

[guardajoias]

One more vote! This, and global variables,are key features! Thanks in advance!

Regards,

[rafval]

Hi Brendan
Just another vote for the need to add calculated field capability between parent:child forms as soon as possible.

Regards,

[Zsolt Székely]

Hi,

I have bought the 5th version of Tap Forms and I was very unhappy because the calculation between two forms is not solved. Dear Brandon please try to find free time to implement this function to the version of iOS. The Tap forms is a really great app but without more complete calculations it looses so much from its charm.

Could you tell more about when can you solve this issue?

Many thanks,

Zsolt

[Brendan]

Hi Zsolt,

I understand the need and demand for it, but I have no specific timeline for when I can write this function. Sorry.

Brendan

[Ronlangara]

Brendan
As there is no timeline for adding calculations based on child data is there a timeline on fixing the bug in TF5 for IOS that does not display the total from a child field in the left hand column summary of a form? I had emailed you about this before and you were going to look into it. Hope that at least this can be fixed soon as without it I can’t use TF5 and have to stay with the previous version on mac and iPad. I just did a new install of the IOS version and migrate of the data with latest version and it still did not work.
Regards,
Ron

[Brendan]

Hi Ron,

I’m very sorry for this. Can you please email me a screenshot of the previous version of Tap Forms so I can see what it is that you need in Tap Forms 5? My apologies if you sent one already before.

[scneophyte]

Just in case Brendan is not sick yet of votes for this feature request:

+1 from me!

[umberto t]

Also for me, Brendan!

[Ivan Herman]

I saw this thread and, actually, there is something I do not understand. I tried to do what others on the thread (I believe) tried to do: on form A I have entries with numerical values; on form B I use the ‘link to form’ field to get specific records and I would like to take, say, the sum of values in a column. The strange thing is that there is something called ‘calculation row’ (there is a small sigma sign underneath the table to switch that off and on) and, furthermore, on the online manual it shows an example where that entry would actually contain the sum as I wanted. However… I have absolutely no idea how to set the formulae for that calculation row. Did I miss something in the manuals or is it something that is not (yet) implemented in the first place?

[Brendan]

Hi Ivan,

Go to the Linked Form and click on the Form button in the toolbar. Then the Fields tab. Then select your Number field. Then click on the Summary Calculation popup button to choose how you want the calculation. You can choose Total, Min, Max, and Avg.

[Ivan Herman]

Brendan,

thank you, it works indeed.

May I suggest that you add this information somewhere in the manual? It is not very intuitive, at least for me, that this is an information you have to set in the linked form and not in the form that links from.

thanks again

[Ronlangara]

Brendan
Have you had a chance to see why the linked form Total does not show up in the Parent Form list on IOS 5.0.7 as per the files I emailed you quite some time ago?

Are you getting closer to being able to access child form data for calculations in the parent form?

Regards,
Ron

[Brendan]

I’m sorry Ron but I haven’t resolved this issue yet. It shows on the details view, but not the list view. Unfortunately with the new database engine I’m using this is a complicated problem to solve. I just need to dig into it and work out a solution.

[Ronlangara]

Hi Brendan
Just wanting to check if you will be addressing this issue soon?
I am still using TF 4 due to this bug.
Best regards for the New Year.
Ron

[Brendan]

Hi Ron,

Yes, the next update will show the calculations from a Link to Form field on the records list view.

[Ronlangara]

Great to hear from you and hope it comes soon.

How about adding the ability to access the the data in a child form from the parent form?

Regards
Ron

[Brendan]

Well now that’s a much bigger request :)

[Ronlangara]

Brendan
Any update on the timing of this next update for the IOS version of TF 5?
Ron

[Ronlangara]

Brendan
Great to see 5.1 adds accessing child fields from the parent! Thanks.

The switch to 5.1 was not as slick as I’d expected but after a couple of false starts, I got it working.

However in TF 5.1 if I do a backup from the “File” menu it crashes the app on OSX. If I do the backup from “Preferences” it works. I thought you would want to know.

Ron

[Brendan]

Hi Ron,

Hmm… Can you please email me the crash report?

Also, can you update to Tap Forms 5.1.1 for Mac?

[Brendan]

Also, in Tap Forms 5.1, when you do a backup, it closes the document after the backup and re-opens it. So maybe that seems like a crash, but it’s not. It’s just closing the database file before it makes a backup and then closes the document and re-opens it in order to re-open the database file.

[Author]

Posts