External File Links

[ArsAstronautica]

As a recovering Bento user, I must say that Tap Forms looks like an excellent replacement. I have converted by old Bento DBs into Tap Forms and am learning my way around it. I am especially appreciative of it being available on Mac, iPhone, & iPad, and also the iCloud syncing. That was a requirement for any Bento replacement.

Onto the issue. I have a form that has a link to a small snippet of video. All told, I have perhaps a couple dozen records, each of which has a small movie (.m4v, .mp4) linked. I did this on the Mac (I prefer to do the main editing setup on the Mac and then push the files to the iDevices. I use the iDevices to reference the DB and to make small updates/changes). When I synced via iCloud, the forms and links came across just fine.

One thing I noticed on my iDevices was that the links to the movies came across fine, but took forever to load the first time. Looking into the attachment folder, I saw that the movies are there, but not downloaded to the iDevice. They are in the cloud (yay!), just not all downloaded (not so yay). Now if I try and open the Movie, it will slowly churn and eventually open the Movie. Looking at the attachments folder, indeed the file has been downloaded. (yay!)

My question is, it will be rather laborious to have to tap to open each movie on each device to get it to download. Is there a way to force this to occur globally? Or, perhaps, I should use the web feature to load the movies from my Mac directly to the iDevice? How does that play with the links I have wrt iCloud?

I’d like to avoid having to march trough manually and I’d like to download the files now over wireless so I do not need to download them over cellular, should I call upon one. If I must download each to each iDevice from the cloud I will, but naturally I prefer not to.

[Brendan]

So what iCloud does is downloads a proxy file when it does its sync between devices. For the syncing of the database data, when Tap Forms is notified that one of these proxy files is available, it sends a command to the operating system to actually download the full file. When the full file has been downloaded, it processes the sync.

But for file attachments, I don’t do that until you initiate the download by viewing the file. I understand this can take a while to download if it’s a large file.

I was told by an Apple engineer at WWDC last year, that the Mac is a little more aggressive and actually downloads the files when they’re available instead of just when the user requests them.

Perhaps that behaviour will change in updates to iOS 7. I’m not sure. In any case, it’s done that way to reduce storage space requirements on your device and to prevent unnecessary bandwidth consumption.

I’m not sure that’s something I want to change at this point though.

Thanks,

Brendan

[ArsAstronautica]

I gathered from the behavior of the attachments that this is what iCloud did. I was not so much looking for a change as if there was a way to force a download of all the files. That way I could do it on WiFi and have the files there. That way at some future date I would not have to do download the file on cellular if I needed the file when I was out and about.

And, as it turns out, there is a way, sort of. If I open the attachments, I can tap each file that is still in iCloud and force a down load. Not optimal perhaps, for I have a couple dozen, but straightforward and the attachments are marked if they are in the cloud and not downloaded.

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