Calculation between two linked forms

Hi Antoine,

Child forms don’t have access to the fields from their parent, so you won’t be able to create a formula in a Calculation field which references fields in the parent. Nor can parent forms reference the fields from child forms. A form can only reference the fields of itself. I’m very sorry for that.

Thanks

Brendan

Hi Grey,

There’s no workaround other than to do it manually by adding a separate field to your parent form. Then you could just copy the total from the bottom of the Link to Form field.

But it’s definitely something I want to do to enhance the Calculation engine. Something like [Child Form:Total(Amount)]. Don’t try this though. It’s just a though and hasn’t been implemented.

Thanks,

Brendan

Hi, Brendan,
Impossibility of exchanging data between forms is a real trouble in building database with a few financial calculations ((( I have finished the structure of my base in 30 minutes (it’s really very easy!!!), all movement of clients, contracts, linked payments and rewards are working, but I can’t calculate accepted or estimated payments for selected contract or seller ( May be you have seen such structure before and have idea how can I solve this problem?

Sincerely, Vladimir

Brendan,

you mentioned

“Child forms don’t have access to the fields from their parent, so you won’t be able to create a formula in a Calculation field which references fields in the parent. Nor can parent forms reference the fields from child forms. A form can only reference the fields of itself. I’m very sorry for that.
But it’s definitely something I want to do to enhance the Calculation engine. Something like [Child Form:Total(Amount)]. Don’t try this though. It’s just a though and hasn’t been implemented.”

I just decided to start switching from Bento to Tap Forms, which I find interesting. But the ability to access to the content of any field in a linked form is really needed. It s very very convenient for proceeding with calculation taking into account values that are located in the liked form, or to automatically assign content to fields, using information from the linked form.

You mentioned that this is something you definitely want to do. Would you have any idea about when this could be available.

Thanks for your answer.

Hi,

I will second this feature request. Would be wonderful for invoicing, and a lot of reports.

Hi Fabien,

No, I haven’t had time to work on this. After my big work on adding the Dropbox Sync API to Tap Forms, Dropbox decided to deprecate the Dropbox Sync API, so I’ve been working on a big migration to Couchbase. It has touched every part of Tap Forms and is a very big job for me. But I’m making great progress on that at the moment. I just haven’t had the time to enhance the Calculation engine with this ability yet.

Thanks,

Brendan

One more vote! This, and global variables,are key features! Thanks in advance!

Regards,

Hi,

I have bought the 5th version of Tap Forms and I was very unhappy because the calculation between two forms is not solved. Dear Brandon please try to find free time to implement this function to the version of iOS. The Tap forms is a really great app but without more complete calculations it looses so much from its charm.

Could you tell more about when can you solve this issue?

Many thanks,

Zsolt

Brendan
As there is no timeline for adding calculations based on child data is there a timeline on fixing the bug in TF5 for IOS that does not display the total from a child field in the left hand column summary of a form? I had emailed you about this before and you were going to look into it. Hope that at least this can be fixed soon as without it I can’t use TF5 and have to stay with the previous version on mac and iPad. I just did a new install of the IOS version and migrate of the data with latest version and it still did not work.
Regards,
Ron

Just in case Brendan is not sick yet of votes for this feature request:

+1 from me!

I saw this thread and, actually, there is something I do not understand. I tried to do what others on the thread (I believe) tried to do: on form A I have entries with numerical values; on form B I use the ‘link to form’ field to get specific records and I would like to take, say, the sum of values in a column. The strange thing is that there is something called ‘calculation row’ (there is a small sigma sign underneath the table to switch that off and on) and, furthermore, on the online manual it shows an example where that entry would actually contain the sum as I wanted. However… I have absolutely no idea how to set the formulae for that calculation row. Did I miss something in the manuals or is it something that is not (yet) implemented in the first place?

Brendan,

thank you, it works indeed.

May I suggest that you add this information somewhere in the manual? It is not very intuitive, at least for me, that this is an information you have to set in the linked form and not in the form that links from.

thanks again

I’m sorry Ron but I haven’t resolved this issue yet. It shows on the details view, but not the list view. Unfortunately with the new database engine I’m using this is a complicated problem to solve. I just need to dig into it and work out a solution.

Hi Ron,

Yes, the next update will show the calculations from a Link to Form field on the records list view.

Well now that’s a much bigger request :)

Brendan
Great to see 5.1 adds accessing child fields from the parent! Thanks.

The switch to 5.1 was not as slick as I’d expected but after a couple of false starts, I got it working.

However in TF 5.1 if I do a backup from the “File” menu it crashes the app on OSX. If I do the backup from “Preferences” it works. I thought you would want to know.

Ron

Also, in Tap Forms 5.1, when you do a backup, it closes the document after the backup and re-opens it. So maybe that seems like a crash, but it’s not. It’s just closing the database file before it makes a backup and then closes the document and re-opens it in order to re-open the database file.