Gear check list

[Juha Ranta]

Hi,

I’ve already made an inventory of my hiking, travel, trail running etc gear in Tap Forms. I like having the gear information, personal notes, weight, etc with me.

Now, I’m trying to create something like this Andrew Skurka gear list for travel/hiking list. https://andrewskurka.com/backpacking-gear-list-template-checklist-3-season/

I have the gear in Tap Forms already. I’ve been thinking of different options to create this kind of a gear list. In the end I’d like to export is as a Taskpaper/OmniFocus list.

I did it this it this time by exporting from Tap Forms as CSV, then importing the items with their weight in Google Sheets. It was plenty of manual work.

I wonder if there’s a good way to implement this kind of a system in Tap Forms. It would need:

– Topics for things like
– Utilities
– Clothing
– Food
– Reference to select a tool from the gear list in Tap Forms
– Way to calculate total count, maybe some more complicated calculations, such as in back / clothed on me
– A default template that has the typical gear that’s with me for a backpacking hike for instance

So I was thinking if this kind of a gear list system is easy to do with Tap Forms, or maybe I should export to csv, import to some spreadsheet software, etc. I work as a software engineer and can do scripting too with Ruby, Python, etc. I’m not just sure about what’s the best way to implement this kind of a thing at the moment, so I’d appreciate feedback. Thanks!

[Juha Ranta]

Hmm, one thing I’m thinking is making those “ELEMENT PROTECTION”, “UTILITIES”, etc fields as just columns, which would make it easier to use with spreadsheet software, etc. But if I create a new form in Tap Forms for this kind of a gear list, is there a way to pre-populate the list with certain values from some kind of a template?

[Sam Moffatt]

Looking at the sample checklist I’d probably structure four forms:

– Template: blue columns; the category heading (e.g. “footwear”) is another field. Add a checklist for “active”.
– Hikes: hike metadata of when, where, etc that isn’t checklist related.
– Checklist: green columns; the category heading (e.g. “footwear”) is another field.
– Gear: simple form with your gear information normalised.

Category heading is another field because it’s really a property of each row in that spreadsheet but we need to tell the computer that. Tap Forms has a spreadsheet like view, the multicolumn list view (MCLV), and you can use the grouping feature to recreate the column heading.

I’d model Hikes as being linked to Checklist and Checklist having a link to Gear. You might want to add a “default gear” field to the template that can be used as well for stuff you almost always use (same sun glasses). From there I’d likely look at scripting to create a “hike” and then create new checklist records, linked to the hike, from the template records. I added the “active” field to the template so that you can use a saved search on active records when creating the checklist items. It allows you to have a template item that isn’t copied easily.

On my YouTube channel, I have a <a href=
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB4EavvTihQ&list=PLyMabv86X9YFlGFdj5BWszcgYd9cSc-Jw”>playlist on building a meal planner which includes a shopping list that is built on the fly. Episode 3 introduces the shopping list and covers how to create “trips” with items from the list that haven’t been bought yet. A similar approach could be used where instead of a shopping list, it’s your template form and you create a hike from it and copy the entries over to the checklist. I made some tweaks in later episodes to the scripts for QOL but episode three demonstrates finding records, creating a new one and linking them together. The video on processing semistructured data into records also covers a use case where I’m copying data to create a new record though the focus parsing there.

On the value replication for stuff like weight, you can use a calculation field to copy field values from parent of link to form 1:M though going the other way requires scripting to handle multiple values.

Bit of a mind dump, hope this helps!

[Juha Ranta]

Sam, thanks for the ideas! I do have the simple gear list with all the information in Tap Forms. I’ll look at creating a gear list like that in Tap Forms, and tell my experience of it. But right now, I’m busy packing. :)

[Juha Ranta]

Hi,

I didn’t get to figuring out how to create the actual gear list from Tap Forms. But if anyone is interested in how I did export from that Skurka’s gear list to TaskPaper/OmniFocus, here’s what I did. I’m thinking of doing something similar if I get the TaskPaper gear list working.

– I added my gear to the Google Sheets document, with some modifications.
– Exported to a csv file.
– Converted the list to a Taskpaper format with this quick Ruby script. It’s specific to the format that was in that Skurka page, but you get the idea.


require "byebug"
require "CSV"

csv_file = ARGV[0]
csv = CSV.new(File.new(csv_file)).read

# Skip the header row.
csv[1...].each do N|row|N
# Skip the empty rows.
next if row[0].nil?

my_requirement = row[5]
my_item = row[6]

if row[1].nil? && row[2].nil? && row[3].nil?
puts "\n#{row[0]}:"
elsif !my_item.nil? || my_requirement == "Required"
taskpaper_item = "\t- #{row[0]} - #{row[6]}"
puts taskpaper_item
end

end

Then I’m able to open the checklist while packing with MacOS TaskPaper. Or, since OmniFocus supports importing TaskPaper files, I can add it there as well. See the attachment.

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