Issues with Tap Forms 5

[John Geisel]

In Tap Forms 4 (iOS) I have two forms defined, one called “Students” and the other “Lessons”. “Students” is linked to “Lessons” in a one-to-many relationship.

In “Students” the first four field types are Calculation, Link-to-Form, Text, and Text. The Calculation field (“Full Name”) concatenates the two Text fields (“First Name” and “Last Name”). List View Fields is set to 1.

In “Lessons” the first five fields are of type Date & Time, Link-from-Form, Calculation, Number, and Text. List View Fields is set to 5 and the Sort & Group Settings specifies the Date & Time field as the First Sort Field.

In typical usage I open the Students form which displays a list of student names. Clicking a student’s name opens the full “Students” form. The second field in “Students” is the Link-to-Form field, in this case called “Lessons” (same as the underlying “Lessons” form).

Clicking on the “Lessons” field opens the “Lessons” form in list view which shows all of the lessons given to one particular student and sorted by date. Recall that List View Fields is set to 5 in the form “Lessons”. The list view always shows the Date & Time field first, followed by the Link-from-Form field (in this case the student’s full name) in the second position. The remaining three fields may or may not be displayed, depending on whether or not data was entered in the fields. Each record is of variable height, depending on the number of fields to be displayed.

This is where I encounter problems in Tap Forms 5 (which uses exactly the same form structure and the same data). The previous paragraph describes the behavior in Tap Forms 4 when opening the “Lessons” form from “Students”. In the Tap Forms 5 list view the first field correctly shows the Date & Time field. However, the Link-from-Field that should be displayed in the second position is missing. Every record shows excessive white space above and below to account for the missing field.

Clicking on a “Lessons” record opens the full form which correctly displays all entered data, including that of the Link-from Form field. However, duplicating the record at this point and then returning to the “Lessons” list view causes the duplicated record to completely disappear because the Link-from-Form data is not copied into the new duplicated record, which becomes an orphan in the “Lessons” database.

When opening the “Lessons” form directly without first going through the “Students” form, the list view correctly displays all fields, including the Link-from Form field. I have not experimented with record duplication in this situation (opening “Lessons” directly). In a previous forum topic a user complained about duplicated records disappearing from his or her database. The creation of orphaned records may provide an explanation

I have also experienced the following issues in Tap Forms 5 (sorry this is so long-winded):

1. When duplicating a record, the panel at the top of my iPhone 6 Plus screen does not retract sufficiently to be able to see the first field. This was not an issue in Tap Forms 4.

2. When duplicating a record that has a Date & Time field, editing the field displays another form connected to the iOS Calendar app that includes a line called “Title”. Changes made to the duplicated record are not reflected on this “Title” line, and they probably should be. “Title” continues to display data from the original record, not the updated duplicate record.

Tap Forms is a wonderful product and I look forward to exploring its many capabilities, particularly on my Mac. I can send screen shots and/or data if the issues I have enumerated above cannot be reproduced in the lab. Thank you!

[Brendan]

Hi John,

Sure, if you could email me your parent form template then I can investigate this further.

Thanks,

Brendan

[John Geisel]

I am sending a couple of files that hopefully illustrate the problems on your end.

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[John Geisel]

The zip file contains two screen shots, one taken using Tap Forms 4, the other with Tap Forms 5.

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[John Harris]

John,

I’m also creating a teacher database. Very hard to work with this app with the current range of issues, but I’m persistant. We could exchange databases if you’re interested.

I teach high school and have the following tables :
Logging – for student behavior
Observations : for academic observations
Marking : well .., for marking
Tasks – which I use to do my planning
Lessons : which I am only just starting to use

Most of which link back to students.

Cheers – John

[John Geisel]

Hi John,
I am a musician giving instrumental lessons to a few students, so my needs are simple. I uploaded my form templates to this forum thread so Brendan could work with them. Feel free to take a look if you are interested. I am continuing to use Tap Forms 4 until the newest version has more wrinkles ironed out.
All the best – John

[Brendan]

Hi John G,

I’ve fixed the bug that was preventing the Link From Form field to be displayed on the records list view. The extra space was caused by Tap Forms accommodating for the extra value that wasn’t being displayed as you suspected.

[John Geisel]

Thanks Brendan! Will fixing the Link-from-Form bug also fix the orphaned record problem when duplicating a linked record as outlined in my original post?

[Brendan]

No, that was just a display issue. The other one is a separate issue which I still have to look into.

[Tyson Schoeber]

Hi John,

If you’d be willing to share, I’d love to take a look at the teacher database you spoke of. I’ve been using TapForms in my elementary special education classroom for the past 18 months to run my individualized programming — and it’s working GREAT. Yet I have also been experimenting with some of the other fields and ideas you mentioned (i.e. behaviour tracking, etc.).

— Tyson

[John Harris]

Hi Tyson,

I’ll post the database when I’ve done a little more rationalising – so it’s a little cleaner. Give me another few weeks and I will post it.

Here’s my email, send me a reminder : john@jjharris.com

John

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