Newbie Questions/ Feature Request Post

[beagley]

Below are my “Is there a way to do this that I’m missing?” and/or feature requests. If anyone has any ideas how to make these things happen with existing features in TapForms, please write me back!

My #1: Is there a way to hack better relational database support? I don’t need MUCH more, but I definitely need to display a selected field in the child record, such as the “Name” of the client that the session belongs to in a Client and Sessions relationship. And can I have a field in the parent form contain a calculation based on fields in all matching records in a child? Better two-way relationships, and just an overall better support for links and relationships, and this thing will kick butt!

The #2 request I have is a list view that can be adjusted on the fly with more options for complex reporting, and a list view that lets me sort it in different ways on the fly, based on different fields. As far as I can tell, you get one sorting value, and you can set one mathematical calculation field for an entire Form, and then the list view will show a total or average or similar at the bottom, and that’s it. I’d love a little more power in this area, such as “Show me all records that have X value for X field”. I want to be able to quickly see a list of all clients with status X, for example.

The #3 request is customizing the output. The current e-mailed record looks GREAT, but obviously sometimes I need to select which fields will appear. (And as per item #1, I wish my export of a record could include a field value of a parent record in a linked relationship. I want an exported session to include the client’s name.)

Any comments or shoves on these would be heartily appreciated!

-D

[Brendan]

Hi D,

Thanks for your feature suggestions. A couple of these are already on my to-do list. One is adding inverse relationships which would allow you to navigate to the parent record from a child record. But there could possibly be more than one depending on if you were using a one-to-many or a many-to-many.

I also intend on adding an advanced search which would let you pick fields to do searches on and then save that as a canned query for later retrieval. It could also have specific sort criteria which would let you have a form sorted in multiple ways. Right now you can sort by up to 3 separate fields, but you’d have to change the sort fields each time you wanted to sort differently. It’s not hard, just a few extra taps than what would be a much better solution with the canned searches.

I’ll take your #3 request into consideration.

Thanks!

Brendan

[beagley]

Awesome. The saved-search-query tool especially sounds dead on.

Aha! I did not notice the ability to set multiple sort fields! I see it now and that will be useful immediately. (For anyone finding this thread, it is Edit Form–>Sort & Group Settings. Not sure how I missed that.)

Best wishes,

-D

[Brendan]

Hi D,

Please note that the multiple sort fields is for cascading the sorts, not for having separately available sorting. That is, the list will be first sorted by Sort Field 1, then the results will be sorted by Sort Field 2, then the results will be sorted by Sort Field 3.

So if you were sorting by Movie Date, then Movie Title, all the years would be grouped together and sorted, then within each year, the movies would be sorted by Title. When you use the Group function, that is like an extra level of sorting, but the values in the headers are the actual values being grouped by as opposed to just the first letter of each first sort value.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks!

Brendan

[beagley]

Yup! I got that.

It means that I can sort my client list by status, for example, and THEN by name. It’s handy.

-D

[Brex]

Very keen on seeing Inverse Relationships added for my Use Case. Specifically I’d like to create a new Child record and have a Parent field within it that would allow me to specify the related Parent record. Then I could quickly add Child records without having to navigate to the specific Parent record, and scroll down to the link to the Child, create new, etc etc.

This would be huge. Thanks

[Author]

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