Glitch in pasting from Contacts into a text field in Tap Forms (solved)

[Randolph Burgess]

I was getting very irate earlier today when I discovered that in the records I was entering into a Tap Forms database, a particular text field kept losing its value when I moved from one record to another. This record was meant to hold the first address line when I copied and pasted from Contacts in Mac OS X.

What I eventually realized was, the reason this field wasn’t holding its value is that many if not most of the Contacts I was pasting from had a hidden end-of-line character. And somehow this EOL character was preventing Tap Forms from properly saving that field.

Since I am entering this information manually, the only fix for me is to paste the line into a text editor, backspace to delete the EOL character, and then re-paste the result into Tap Forms. Annoying but it least it works.

[Brendan]

Hi Randolph,

Was this a regular Text field or a Note field? And was it in the Default or a custom layout?

Thanks,

Brendan

[Frank Tikket]

Thats interesting, when i exported my addresses and merged all the cells (street name, city, state, zip code) into one cell and imported into tap forms … the address was spelt out, but I could never get it to find an address on a map. Now I’m thinking its because the apple contacts might have this EOL character preventing any of my address from being found as a location!

My current work around is just formatting the address record as text and copy & paste manually into maps. For some reason it would show the full address with a “null” underneath it… and would never be able to find it.

(although when i made a new location column, and copy and pasted the old location column into the new… the new location column was able to find it.) for this reason, i wish Tap forms had batch data manipulation.

[Brendan]

Hi Frank,

Does your address data also include the longitude and latitude data necessary to find your address on a map? The null you’re seeing is because Tap Forms doesn’t have the latitude and longitude data for it to determine your location.

It gets that data when you manually enter in an address into the Location field’s search field.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Brendan]

Hi Frank,

I just added the ability for Tap Forms to search for a location on the map given an address even if there are no coordinates available. I don’t think it’s guaranteed 100% to find an address. It depends on how good Apple’s address location services are. But it should work most of the time I think.

So with this feature you won’t have to pre-populate the location coordinates during an import. But Tap Forms will only look for the location the moment you tap on the location field to view the map. I have also removed the (null) display when there are no coordinates available.

It will be in the next update.

Thanks!

Brendan

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