Editing Pick Lists

[Tyson Schoeber]

Is there a way to get a good look at the full contents of a Pick List? The Edit Pick Lists window allows a user to see only the first part of a handful of entries. Yet I have a Pick List that has steadily grown to include a hundred or more reusable comments —— and it would be nice to be able to see/edit them all more fully at times.

I’m hoping that they are contained in an editable text file or something. If so, the only trick would be where to find that file and which kind of program can edit it!

Any suggestions?

[Brendan]

Hi Tyson,

There’s no function built-in for viewing them all in bulk like you need other than scrolling through the list that’s there.

But you could export your form that references the Pick List you want to look at as a Tap Forms Archive (.tfarc) file, then rename the .tfarc extension to .zip and unzip the file. Then inside the folder that’s created will be a data.json file. You could open that up in a plain text editor like TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/) and search for one of the values in your Pick List. You’ll see something like this:

  "values" : [
    {
      "value" : "Action & Adventure",
      "valueColour" : "0xFFFF0000"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Comedy",
      "valueColour" : "0xFFFF00FF"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Documentary",
      "valueColour" : "0xFF0000FF"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Drama",
      "valueColour" : "0xFF006400"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Fantasy",
      "valueColour" : "0xFF6FC8F8"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Horror",
      "valueColour" : "0xFF800080"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Kids & Family",
      "valueColour" : "0xFFFF69B4"
    },
    {
      "value" : "Science Fiction",
      "valueColour" : "0xFF00BFFF"
    }
  ],

You could edit those there and then re-zip the folder and rename the .zip extension back to .tfarc and then re-import the Tap Forms Archive file into your document. You could import into a new document first to check to see if everything looks ok first before re-importing into the document it came from. Tap Forms will update the data in the document this way.

I know it’s not a perfect solution, but it should work.

Hope that helps!

Brendan

[Tyson Schoeber]

Thank you, Brenden! This approach works very well! I really appreciate your support.

I followed your step-by-step directions and was able to edit the Pick List with ease. It was also interesting to see how the code places an extra “\” character before embedded punctuation like quotation marks, apostrophes and slashes. I realized that it will be important to avoid editing those spots or to imitate that format.

I also discovered that I had about 250 entries saved in that Pick List, rather than the 100 that I thought I had. The list has grown bigger and faster than I’d imagined!

[Author]

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