Exporting of data – Moving from Memento/Android to iPhone

[Rich Trice]

I am looking to move from an android devices and one of the biggest hold ups is the fact that I use memento database as a database. Today with memento I use a database to catalog “inventory” items daily and when I am done for the day I sync with Google Drive/Sheets from their I can import my data from the sheet and drive into my line of business application.

What I need to know is if I can sync the tap forms database and images to a “cloud” server and then download a csv and images to a PC as my line of business application only runs on a PC. Today my csv/excel file when exported has the following columns

Inv #, Title, description, value, category, image names, image urls

Is this something tap forms can do?

Thanks in advance

[john cesta]

I had memento too. While you can export to cvs from memento the images get dumped as URLs. You will be able to import the memento csv file to TF but i don’t know about the images. And in memento if you saved descriptions/notes it exports as funky coded stuff.

I never used memento to send to google sheets. I looked at the value of it but never needed to use it that way.

you can export TF to csv and send it just about anywhere. I imagine with scripting etc you can run this function programmatically.

But I would also go as far as to say you could probably recreate your entire application with TF and run it on Mac. ;)

good luck

[Sam Moffatt]

TF supports CouchDB/Cloudant as a cloud backed sync store and sends the documents there. From there you can use the CouchDB API to retrieve data and export it in the formats you need on any platform. You would need to do some work to convert from Tap Form’s JSON document structure into the format you need but it’s possible to do. Image are stored as attachments of the record they are associated with and can be downloaded from CouchDB as well. Sync is continuous when the TF instance and the server is available, if you don’t want to use a hosted service, you could also run the CouchDB server on your PC.

With some work you can also use the Nearby Sync to directly get data from your iOS device on the PC. Nearby Sync leverages the same CouchDB API (with some caveats) so you can use this to extract data out of Tap Forms that way.

You could also export CSV from TF to a cloud data store though I’m not sure how effective that would be for your use case.

[Rich Trice]

Basically I need to easily export the csv and associated images per row.

Guess I will see if there is a trial.

[Sam Moffatt]

I gave this a shot because I was curious and was able to export a CSV with images (make sure to enable “Export Media” in the Import & Export Settings under Tools), it zipped the images together with the CSV and put them in the export area in Tap Forms. I used the built in web server to pull down the ZIP file from my phone and that seemed to work fine for me. There was the option to upload to iCloud Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive that I had connected via the Files app. I did an upload to Dropbox and it showed up though I did go to the Dropbox app as well just to give it a kick to upload quicker (it was 27MB, exported a little more than I expected).

One thing is that I didn’t see the ability to select individual records however what you could do is create a saved search and then use a checkbox field to select the records you want to export or perhaps do a saved search for records modified today.

Hopefully this helps!

[Rich Trice]

WOW thanks Sam, I am going to buy the app today myself and play as well.

[Rich Trice]

Sam, what is the built in web server you are talking about?

[Sam Moffatt]

In Tap Forms for iOS, if you go to Tools on the bottom, tap on “Files” there will be a power switch icon at the bottom left which if you click on it will activate the built in web server. It’ll say “web server off” when disabled or include your mDNS name of your device. Usually if you have iTunes for Windows installed, the mDNS address should resolve however if it isn’t showing up you will have to head to your wifi settings to get your IP address. Once it’s active it’ll drop you into a Tap Forms directory, the Exports are under the “Files” heading. Make sure Tap Forms is active and in the foreground, if it goes into the background iOS suspends the process.

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