Moving Records from One Form to Another

[John Pullyblank]

Like many, I am moving away from Bento now that it is not working well with Yosemite.

As a Psychologist, my workflow consists of 3 databases/forms: Bookings, Work in Progress, and Completed Work, all with identical fields. Each database has a number of complex searches attached to it.

I’m having 2 problems moving over to Tap Forms from Bento. The first is that Tap Forms 3.0 is unusably slow, particularly with the 12 fields X 5645 records, and growing, Completed Work. I understand that this will be repaired in 3.0.1.

The other issue is being able to move records (remember the fields are carefully identical) from one database to another. In looking at how to do this, I found some 2013 material in the forum that said this was not permitted as it would be a mess with dissimilar fields. Is this still the case, or is there now a way to move records between databases. Like the 2013 user, I am not interested in having one super-database, but really, really want 3 separate databases that I move records among.

Help is appreciated,

John

[Leo]

Hi,

Create selection
export the records you want to move tot CSV. UTF-8, semicolon delimited, No recordID, field tags on.

import the records and select the form you want to move the record in. (DEFAULT = NEW FORM) Make sure the settings are the same as with the export.

Delete selection

I believe this gets things done

Leo

[Brendan]

Hi John,

Is it not sufficient to create multiple saved searches which filter your records into different lists? Most customers that ask me about moving records to separate forms aren’t aware of the ability to filter their forms using saved searches.

Thanks,

Brendan

[John Pullyblank]

Thanks to both Leo and Brendan for your responses.

I go back a long way with databases and really enjoy what they do for us. I occasionally have a moment of silence for Appleworks.

I understand that I could put everything together and add a field to sort them into lists like Bookings, etc. However, my preference to have separate databases comes from a number of places. First is experiences with corrupt databases that if you have everything in one pot and it all goes bad, it literally all goes bad. With backups upon backups I’m very covered for this, but I still like separating things out. Second, with separate databases, each one is nimble, unlike keeping all the archived and active records in one place. Finally, its easier to do searches and look at the data if you already have it pre-sorted into the major categories. I guess the main thing is that I just prefer to do it that way.

So I’m taking from this that moving records among databases/forms is not a feature of Tap Forms, other than by workaround. My view is that wines and movies is one thing, but for us business/nerd folks, being able to cut and paste between forms is a desirable feature.

[Brendan]

Hi John,

Thanks for your explanation. It’s valuable feedback for me.

In any case, no matter whether or not you have your records in one form or another form, Tap Forms does still store all the data in a single common database file called TapForms_db.sqlite. You can find it in the following folder:

~/Library/Containers/com.tapforms.mac/Data/Documents

But this is something I hope to improve upon for a future update sometime. I would really love to be able to have collections of forms stored in completely different documents.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Michael Whittle]

Hi Brendan, can you make a video to cover this issue of moving records from one form to another, or some way to see records that exist in shared fields ? I’m creating an inventory of all of my art works and one work can shared many similar fields. I’d like to be able to separate my works by exhibition, year, medium, availability, etc.
Thanks, Michael

[Brendan]

Hi Michael,

You should be using Saved Searches for this purpose. That’s what they were designed for.

See the online user manual on Searching:

http://www.manula.com/manuals/tap-zapp/tap-forms-mac/3/en/topic/searching

Thanks!

Brendan

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