My TF history.

Ya, sorry about that. I use the BBPress plug-in for WordPress. I didn’t write the system and am not familiar with the PHP language it uses.

As far as Tap Forms being like a spreadsheet, it’s similar in a way, but not totally. Essentially it would be like a spreadsheet that has the first row having the field names and the rest of the rows being the data. In Tap Forms, the first row would be like all the Fields you define. And the other rows would be the records that you define.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks,

Brendan

You’re getting confused between Documents and Forms. Think of a Document as a file on disk. Think of a Form as just one of many items inside your Document. The [+] button on the main Database Documents screen is not the only place you can create a new document. You can also select New Document from the File menu. It does the same thing.

If you’re at all familiar with Excel, a Document in Tap Forms is analogous to an XLSX file on disk. Inside the Excel XLSX file you can have one or more Worksheets. Those are analogous to a Form in Tap Forms.

The main Database Documents window that you see is just a view to the Tap Forms document files (each with a .tapforms file extension) stored in the Finder. Just like a Word document, an Excel document, a Pages or Keynote document. It’s really no different in Tap Forms. A document is a file on disk. A form is a thing you create inside a document that lets you store your records. You can create as many documents as you like on disk and you can create as many forms as you like inside each separate document.

The My Forms thing is a popup button which lets you choose between My Forms which shows only those forms that have 1 or more records. When you choose All Forms, you can see all the forms in the document, even those with zero records or those you’ve explicitly hidden using the Hide Form option on the Form inspector panel.

The plus button next to the My Forms popup button does not create documents. It creates forms. The tooltip (if you hover over your mouse) even says New Form.

There’s only one single layer where you create documents and one layer where you create forms. They’re not the same thing. I hope I’ve made it a bit more clear here.

An archive file stores pretty much everything you need to re-create a form when imported into another document or given to another person. Yes, there are a few settings which are not stored, but those are things that are most important to just the user interface, such as what was the last form or record that was selected the last time you quit Tap Forms. Those things aren’t something that needs to be stored along with the data (IMHO).

No, the Finder doesn’t know about what’s inside of the .tapforms documents, so it can’t split out one form from one document and put it into another. That’s what archives are for. It would be like saying “Why can’t the Finder take this specific worksheet within my Excel document and move it over to another document?”. Or “why can’t the Finder move a group of photos from inside the Photos app into another place?”. You need to go into those applications and export your data and then import them into another app or document.

As for the backup sizes, they can vary depending on what you’re doing and if you compact the database and then do a backup. Compacting the database on the Maintenance screen will temporarily create a write-ahead log (WAL) file which could be fairly large. That may have been included within a backup file. If you close that document the WAL file will be removed and that’ll make the .tapforms document smaller. So one backup file could be smaller than a previous backup file. Or maybe you deleted some photos or something like that.

The instructions do talk about documents, forms, records, fields, etc. Also importing and exporting. However, you’re right, Tap Forms Archives are not really mentioned much in the documentation. I’ll have to add a section for that in the Importing and Exporting areas.

Hopefully I’ve cleared some things up.

If you have any more questions about this or any other aspect of Tap Forms, please don’t hesitate to ask. Happy to help

• This reply was modified 10 months, 3 weeks ago by Brendan.