V5.3 Manual

Excellent. I’m glad you found it. At the top of the online user manual page you can actually switch between the different manual versions.

Hi Mustafa,

There’s no manual for the iOS version, but the Mac manual has many of the same concepts. Plus there are screencast videos for both macOS and iOS versions.

iOS screencasts:
https://vimeo.com/channels/tapformsios

Mac manual:
https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5.3/en/topic/overview

Mac screencasts:
https://vimeo.com/channels/tapformsmac5/page:1

Thanks,

Brendan

As a new user, the manual is too granular. I need something to better understand the architecture of Tapforms and the nomenclature used. I am a retired Lotus Notes developer so I fully understand forms, fields, etc. In notes we use a view to display data which is seen through a form to be a document.

I’m hoping to better understand how Tapforms is organized so I can better develop in it.

Brendon said:
There’s no manual for the iOS version, but the Mac manual has many of the same concepts.

Well, “concepts” yes, but that’s not sufficient. I’m currently trying to work with scripts on iOS, and the Mac manual refers to objects such as menus which don’t seem to exist as such in the iOS version. For example, I still can’t figure out Form scripts vs script fields in records.

And in any case, the gears and levers of scripts are still opaque to me. For example, the scripts chapter in the Mac manual gives an example of a Movie DB script which runs automatically when barcode information is entered into a record’s field. But from the example given, I can’t see how/why that should happen. There seems to be nothing overt in the script which indicates that action. Apparently there is some invisible TapForms code which “magically does the right thing” in some unspecified set of circumstances. I believe that in one of your Forum posts, you said something to the effect of “when Tap see this in your script, it does <something>”, which is not in the basic description of the operation of “this”. Where is all of this sort of thing documented?

FYI: I’m a retired programmer who completely understands that it’s more fun to write code than to write documentation. But I think that for an app as powerful and useful as Tap Forms, a little more work in the latter might be helpful.

OK, great! That helped a lot; thanks.

Now I have one more question (or feature request?):

I have a database of phone calls, with a parent form “Callers” and a child form “Calls”, linked via the phone number. Callers has a join to Calls, to display a nice table of related calls in the Callers record.

What I’m trying to do is extract the number of call records and the date of the last call from the related Calls form records and place those values in fields in the related Callers form record.

I have a script field in Callers with a script which extracts the wanted values and inserts them in the Caller record. The script works fine. Per your info above, I can automatically trigger the script by referring it to a changed field in the Callers record, but apparently only a “real” data field in Callers. What I would like is to have the script run automatically when I add a Call record, by clicking on the “+” in the Calls table joined to the Callers record. But if I try to make my script trigger on changes to that join field, nothing happens, even though it has effectively changed. So I have to manually trigger this script by making a change to a “real” field in the Callers record after adding the new Calls record.

Is there something equivalent to an “event” which will run my script when I add a record to the related Calls form/table? (Maybe this is something I should know, but I’m not (yet) a JavaScript programmer)

Thanks for your help!