one to many… what is relational?

Hi Brendan,

I would love to see this functionality as well. The ability to use a field such as customer number, etc. is very important to a relational database. I have used Oracle, DB2 and other SQL databases on larger systems and this is very important to be able to specify a key field that can be used to create such an automatic link to take out manual work of linking everything by hand all the time. I know that SQLite also supports select statements that do this sort of linking, but brute raw databases lack the user friendliness, presentation and beauty of Tap Forms. We could do so much more with such a feature!

This is the most recent topic I can find on importing linked forms, so I’m going to reply here. (Simple logic.)

I’ve been looking for quite a while for a Bento replacement. Actually, I was looking long before FileMaker dropped Bento. What I wanted was an iCloud sync-ed database that would work on my Mac, my iPhone, and my iPad to keep everything up to date. I never really found anything that met the basic requirements. The closest was probably the venerable old HanDBase; but it doesn’t do cloud sync (which I’d find much more convenient than local WiFi sync), and the Mac client is primitive, ugly, and despite recurring promises virtually unmaintained for years.

And then today I almost accidentally found a recommendation for TapForms.

After spending some time today playing with the Mac demo (thanks for that, by the way!) and reading the forum and documentation, I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re almost there. I think I could use TapForms as I’ve used Bento, with only a few minor inconveniences… and with many advantages (including, not least, supported software, which is always nice).

Except that moving my data from Bento to TapForms would be unacceptably complex without the sort of import infrastructure being discussed in topics like this.

I never tried to use related Bento databases, because I didn’t like the UI. I think your UI for linked forms is a little better, though perhaps still not quite perfect. But my solution in Bento, which did just what I wanted, was the “simple list”. So now, to migrate, I need a solution for simple lists.

You don’t have such a concept, and that’s fine — I’d be satisfied with your linked forms. The challenge comes in converting thousands of Bento records with simple lists into a set of TapForm linked forms — and until that can happen, I’m stuck with Bento.

I can import the Bento data in CSV form. Obviously it’d be convenient if TapForms could just read that format and create the appropriate linked tables; but I’d be happy to write some Perl or Python to massage the data into an appropriate set of separate CSV files — which of course requires that I be able to define the SQL foreign keys that link the tables.

Although that leads me to a possibly more immediate question, since a topic from several years ago seemed to suggest that you’re using sqlite underneath. How sensitive is TapForms to which aspects of database & table structure? Would it be feasible for my hypothetical Python script to tear apart Bento’s CSV export and build a set of tables directly that TapForms would transparently “adopt” as if you’d created them?

(Whether or not I get an answer, when I have some time I’ll probably poke around to find your sqlite files and look inside them to see what I can figure out; but some hints would be appreciated and could be the key to selling a Mac, iPhone, and iPad version of TapForms… because if I can get the Mac demo looking the way I’d like, I’d be ready to go “all in”.)