Form That Has Dropped Fields

[Stephen Dickson]

Hi there,

I have a form that has 6 Fields and about 120 lines. 2 of the fileds are the automatic “Date Created” and “Date Modified”

I use a iMac (main) and an iPad and an iPhone. All running the most up top date operating systems.

The iMac has just dropped two of the fields ( not the “Date Created” and “Date Modified” columns) for absolutely no reason at all. They are available on the iPhone and the iPad. I made a backup from the iPad and used it to restore both the iPhone and iMac. The iPhone is perfect but the iMac just won’t show the two fields for any of the lines. When I look in the fields tab they just don’t exist.

I use nearby to sync them. The iMac has the iPad and iPhone on it and the iPad and iPhone have the iMac on it. So if i change something on the iMac it goes out to both the iPad and iPhone. If I change something on the iPad, it goes to the iMac and then the iPhone and vice versa if I change anything on the iPhone.

It’s really wierd. If I change something on the iPad that’s in the missing columns if I switch the iPhone connection to the iMac off and then Resync it, the item appears on the iPhone even although the iMac doesn’t even have the column.

Anybody have any clue what the heck is going on?

[Sam Moffatt]

Try changing the settings on the fields on the device that has them and seeing if that back propagates to your Mac. Not sure why it’s disappeared but it feels like a weird conflict resolution situation. I don’t know how you’d lose those fields, I’ll defer to the higher power on that one. Seems a weird failure mode.

One other thing I’ve done that has worked is making a triangle with the iPad and the iPhone temporarily set up to sync with each other directly. Sometimes this causes enough writes that when the Mac sees the changes, it propagates and fixes itself. I’ve had this happen in a few situations, some of it is due to how it pulls the updates and resyncs the data.

It doesn’t make much sense to me that your Mac when restored still doesn’t show the fields though. Normally I’d say if both your iPad and your iPhone are in sync with each other and have a true copy, I’d suggest moving your copy on the Mac to a different directory as a backup (you can get the folder from the database document window) and then sending the copy on your preferred device to the Mac. However my read is that you did that and it still doesn’t work properly. Normally restoring a backup should make things square again, it does make me wonder if something deeper is happening or if a change is propagating from somewhere else.

Now how does the record safely get from the two devices that acknowledge the field whilst transiting the one device that doesn’t acknowledge the fields. The underlying near by sync system doesn’t generally modify the record when it receives it from the sync system. If it did change it then you could set up sync loops where two devices continuously update a document and it just keeps going. Forever. Bad juju. So the Mac receives the document in tact from it’s source, doesn’t modify it and then when you setup the sync again it pulls the change out of the Mac. The fact that you have to toggle to get sync to work speaks to me that somewhere is a sync conflict that’s not resolving properly.

[Brendan]

If you find a field missing on one device and not on the other, just make a small change to the field on the device that still has it. Even something like renaming it or changing the field’s title colour. That’ll trigger a sync for that field and it will reappear on the other device.

It may be due to an internal conflict on the record or field that may have caused this problem. But modifying the record or field on the device that still has them should cause the conflict to go away. Maybe even make a few modifications to them to get the internal revision system to create more revisions.

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