Dates and Searching Dates

[Ryan Griffin]

I am new to this program so forgive me.

#1 I have transferred a database over from Bento which contains more than 4,000 Diary records. Each record has a date attached to it in the date field and an entry etc in a different field. In Bento the dates were listed as 1/3/19 but in Tap 5 they are now Jan 3, 2019. How do I get them all to be 1/3/19 again? (It’s easier for me to search for them in 1/3/19 format).

#2 How do I seach for a date but not the year. For example if I want to see what happened on January 3 each year (not just 1/3/19) how do I do a search that will show that date?

#3 Lets say I want to teach for each time my friend Zack came over. How can I search and get a list of all the entries that have the name “Zack” typed into them?

Thanks in advance for this novice.

[Brendan]

Hi Ryan,

#1:
1. Click on the Form button to reveal the form inspector panel.
2. Click the Fields tab.
3. Click your Date field.
4. Set the Date Format property. It’s at the bottom of the field properties inspector panel.

#2:
Use a Saved Search to search for dates. Click the filter button just to the left of the main Search field. But you can’t search a part of a date if you’re trying to search a Date field. What you’ll need to do is add a Calculation field that will use the DATE(X; "dd/MM") function to extract a portion of the date out into a field. Then you can search on that field. In the above format you would search for 03/01 if you wanted to search for the 3rd of January for any year. Make sure the Calculation field returns a Text value.

#3:
Just type Zack into the Search field for your form. Or you could add a Saved Search for that too so Tap Forms remembers the search and then you can just click on the search beneath the form.

Hope that helps!

Brendan

[Ryan Griffin]

Thanks I can’t get the search for a date to work #2. Can you explain what I need to do again. #1 and #3 work perfectly, but what am trying to do is this. Each day I post a this day in history and I look up everything that happened to me on that day. For example everything that has happened to me on December 15th (my birthday).

I created a new calculation field that returned text. But the result for each date is 12/31 no matter what the date is. So 1/3/19 = 12/31. 5/5/95 – 12/31. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

[Brendan]

In the function DATE(X; "dd/MM"), the X part needs to be your field. You can double-click on your date field to insert it into the formula. Maybe you just typed X or maybe you typed in the name of the field instead of double-clicking on it. It should show like a blue rectangular button within the formula.

[Ryan Griffin]

Thanks, that fixed the fields and I can do a search for a specific date now, but there has to be a faster way to do the same thing. I just want to be able to type 01/15 for every January 15th. Is there a faster way to do it and not have to create a search and save it, and then delete it?

[Brendan]

You can just type that into the general search field without creating a saved search for it.

The Calculation result will be indexed into the full text search index. Tap Forms searches all fields though for that string. It also ignores punctuation, so if you want to do a more exact search, surround the term with double-quotes.

[Ryan Griffin]

Thanks! That’s much better and faster… using the double quotes, but because of the ignoring punctuation it renders more result than it should for searching a date. For example if I search for “10/15” in an attempt to find all the things that happen on October 15th, I also get results from “10-15” in an entry and anything with a 10 and 15 in it… like 3/10/15 (March, 10 2015). Any suggestions on how to get past that one? Otherwise we are almost perfect in the functions I need. Like how do I just search the “Date Search” field we just made together [DATE(X; “MM/dd”)] in a quick way without having to created a separate search each time and saving it and then deleting it. Is there a way I can just type “10/15” and have it only search the one field.

[Brendan]

You could also use a different date pattern to avoid the use of punctuation.

So maybe ddMMM instead of MM/dd. You would get a result like 05Jul

The MMM gives you an abbreviated month.

For information on all the date patterns you can use, see this web page:

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-31/tr35-dates.html#Date_Format_Patterns

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