Accessing TF records via external application (Mac)

[ArsAstronautica]

First, wife and I upgraded to TF 5. Migrated our old TF and learning our way around the new. Much to like. The separation of databases and local syncing make it possible for us to share certain Dbs rather easily. Kudos!

But on to my question. I am starting a new project that consists of a catalogue of texts of medieval MS. There are Note fields that contain the text of the item, plus a good deal of other Text fields that contain other information.

Now since this project is just part of a much larger overall project that will produce LaTex and HTML files, I would like to develop some scripts that can access the records in the TF database and extract certain details. Likewise, I would like to be able to go the other way, namely I have accessed a particular record say, modified the contents of a field for some reaon, and then I’d like the app to send the updated field/record back to TF and back to the particular record.

Yes, I know I can export/import my DB via CSV etc., but this DB will get rather large. It would be rather cumbersome to export all the records, run scripts, and then re-import everything and removing duplicates. It would be handy to be able to somehow interface TF with some custom scripting of some sort. Ultimately I am hoping to auto generate the LaTex and HTML.

Thoughts?

[Brendan]

That would probably require some AppleScript support or something like that. I do hope to export records as HTML at some point. But probably not LaTex. That’s pretty specialized.

If you use the Export Tap Forms Archive function, Tap Forms generates a .tfarc file which is really just a zip file that contains a .json file with all the data and an associated attachments folder that contains all the media and stuff. So maybe you could write some code to parse that. Might be tricky though.

[ArsAstronautica]

Yes, an Applescript would be useful to extract specific records, but as best I can tell, TF does not support AppleScript.

As the LaTex/HTML export, those may be useful to others, but not me. I want to use the raw data in TF to construct my own HTML/LaTex.

For now, I will just export the file as text using pipe as a delimiter and go from there. Going back the other way may be copy and paste.

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