Hey There,
If you have an IBM Cloudant account right now, you may have received an email about them shutting down their multi-tenant shared service on March 31, 2018. This is true. They are shutting it down. But all they've done is added Cloudant to their larger suite of services known as IBM Cloud. So Cloudant is now just one service amongst many. It's not going away.
You will have to create a new IBM Cloud account if you wish to continue using their service. I've updated the online user manual with information that will help you to create your new IBM Cloud account for use with Tap Forms 5.
https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5/en/topic/ibm-cloudant-sync
They still have a free Lite plan available that provides up to 1 GB of free storage.
But there is one important caveat to using the new IBM Cloud that didn't exist in the previous Cloudant version. Record sizes can be a maximum of 1 MB. This means if you have a photo or file attachment, you may likely go over the 1 MB size limit. If this is an issue for you, I would suggest contacting support@cloudant.com to see if they can raise the limit. Perhaps if thousands of Tap Forms customers contact them to request the limit be increased, they may do something about it.
[Update: April 3, 2018]: IBM has told me they've increased the request size limit to 11 MB with an individual attachment size no larger than 10 MB. So that should allow you to store some photos in a record. But the content of the record can still be only up to 1 MB. So it's best not to store any images inside of a Note field, which will cause the record size to increase dramatically. In version 5.2.9 (coming soon), I've added a record size indicator at the bottom of the record so you can see how much memory it's taking up. You can see IBM's new size restrictions here:
There are alternative solutions for syncing in Tap Forms. You can switch to iCloud, Nearby (WiFi), or Apache CouchDB. In fact, Apache CouchDB is basically the same thing as IBM Cloudant except you install it on your own server or in your own account on another service provider. And you don't have the 1 MB size limit to contend with.
There are services out there that can also provide you with Apache CouchDB hosting. For example, 1and1.com provides installations of Apache CouchDB that you can use for a very low monthly rate. The only downside is you have to configure the server yourself once it's installed. But I provide instructions on how to configure your own Apache CouchDB server here: https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5/en/topic/couchdb-sync
Thanks!
Brendan
Tap Forms Developer