Moving records to other forms.

There are some scripting solutions to copy a record to another form but in general the suggestion is to use saved searches to filter and limit records that are retrieved.

Perhaps you can share a little more about your workflow, what you’re trying to achieve and how moving records between forms solves this for you?

Ok, so you’re starting with a form and you’re looking to denormalise some data out into a new structure. I’d probably personally use a form script to do the heavy lifting during a data migration but I think what will work best for you is using the export functionality to export the set of records you want to put in the other forms and then reimport it.

One thing is I suspect you’ll want to link these records once you split them apart. If you don’t have some sort of unique key for the records (student ID, client ID, etc), then I’d add one. A really quick way of doing it is to use a calculation field with the function UUID() in it and make sure the type is “Text”. That’ll give you a unique ID so that we can join it later. This might be unnecessary but I change the type to text once it’s generated since I don’t intend to keep using this field.

Next step is to export the records and fields, including our unique field. If you want to export a subset, you’ll need to do a saved search to filter out the ones you’re interested in (should be a funnel icon on the top right next to the search box). If you do File > Export > Records then you’ll get a dialog where you can select the fields you want to bring to your new form. Don’t tick “Export record ID” and “Export linked records” but you will want to tick “Field type tags” and “Export media”. Hit Export and select a folder to send the export the files. You’ll get a CSV file created with a folder full of images to use.

Next step is to import them into your new form. File > Import > Records will let you import to an existing form or even create a new form for you. Choose the CSV file that we just created and then choose the photo folder it would have exported (if you exported a photo field). I always tick the “add missing fields to form” option even though TF should match the field names automatically, it’s useful to have the extra field to understand what went wrong.

That should populate your other form with a bunch of records (yay) though they’re obviously not inherently connected to your old records (boo!). Make sure everything is where you expect it to be though nothing should change (famous last words). This is where the “Link to Form” field type in “JOIN” mode helps us out. Add it to your main form, where it has “Link to Form”, select your target form, click on “JOIN” and then pick the unique ID field (either one you had already or the one just created) and Tap Forms will link those records together for you.

I’d also created a second link to form field with the link type that makes sense for you (either one to many or many to many) so that moving forward you use this field to link the data together. The JOIN field requires both records share a common value and in the long run when you’re not importing data that’s a bit of work. Creating a TF managed link to form field will handle creating the linking metadata between the records for you with some extra UI functionality for picking records, creating them and a bunch more. You can use a script to automate migrating the JOIN’d records, do it manually, or just leave the JOIN field in place and update as you go.

That should enable you to export your data and import it to new forms relatively easily, perhaps not quite as easy as drag and drop but I don’t think it’s an insurmountable problem.

I have a video on leveraging link to form fields that might help you out as well as it covers a couple of different use cases. My channel has a few different videos that might give you some ideas on how you can model your data and make good use of Tap Forms.