Backup

[Stephan Heribert]

Hi, I haven’t made a backup in tap forms, but I made a backup of my entire macbook (with carbon copy cloner).

How ca I find the list in which I destroyed the names by changing text to something else?

Thanks, Stephan

[Sam Moffatt]

You can open up a previous backup from CCC. I personally use Get Backup 3 to create daily snapshots of my Tap Forms documents.

Do you mind expanding on what you were doing to cause the issue to begin with? If you changed the type, generally you can change the type back to get things to work. Most of the time changing the type of a field in Tap Forms is reversible.

[Sam Moffatt]

One extra piece: I would make a copy of the backup and open the copy of the backup so that your original backup is still locked. If you’ve got Time Machine enabled, it will have a copy of the data as well.

If you’re after restoring the historic contents of an a field, what might work is exporting a CSV file with just that field selected and the record ID field set. That should create a CSV file with two fields that you can import to your current document to restore the previous values of those fields. I haven’t tested this, so validate against a copy of your current document tk make sure it does what you expect.

Not entirely sure what you were doing to cause the issue so some more details there could help give you more accurate guidance.

[Stephan Heribert]

Thanks, there were 30 records only, I could repair it after I found a backup in CCC from 2 months ago.

But there was no “undo” working and changing the type gave zero result. Now I enabled “backup when quit” in preverences.

I’m not really in tap forms, it’s not handy like bento was.

[Sam Moffatt]

Odd, there should be a warning when changing a type of a field to another type that there might be data loss.

Brendan’s really responsive to feedback for making the product better, as much as I’ve seen a one man band be able to do, so could you share more details about what didn’t work in this case that you expected different or general pain points and improvements?

[Stephan Heribert]

Thanks Sam for encouraging me to complain about my feeling of discomfort with TF. I still haven’t made the change from Bento to TF. In Bento I had ONE window with all of my databases (called libraries), each contained dozens of lists I could handle separately by creating “sub-libraries”. As it appears complicated to handle in TF, I use it less or not at all.

Example: As a musician I work in many projects handling titles. By managing about 200 titles, I want to recall lists with titles that belong to a certain project, certain length etc. – that was so easily done in bento. The time I spend to find out, I prefer managing it by fumbling by hand.

[Sam Moffatt]

You can continue to do one window with all of your libraries, they’re just known as forms in Tap Forms. Tap Forms lets you create multiple documents if you want but nothing stops you from just having one document with everything in it. With the Form Category feature you can even have multiple related forms (or libraries in Bento parlance) under their own heading and collapse it to hide what you’re not currently working on. I think here there is at least parity.

The collection functionality, as it behaves in Bento, obviously doesn’t exist. However the saved searches can come reasonably close and resemble “smart collections”. Fundamentally a collection is a grouping of records within a library. Bento hides the linking metadata that links a particular record to a collection and also obviously automatically links it when you create a new one. That means to replicate that in Tap Forms would require some work but let’s focus on your problems and see if we can get something close.

The two examples you provide is certain project and certain length. For certain project I would create a Project field with either autocomplete enabled or I’d use a pick list set to either single value popover or combobox possibly leveraging the “use values from field” setting pointing back to the same field (if you use the single value pop over it’ll give you an interface to add new entries to the list directly as well). This ensures that your metadata is consistent and then I’d create a new saved search which points to this Project field and is set to the name of the project. You do need to create a new saved search per value of project you want to jump to quickly, not entirely dissimilar to creating a new collection though with some extra typing. There is an example of a saved search I’ve created for stuff I buy on eBay attached as a screenshot and another one showing the number of saved searches I have (also you can create folders for your searches as well).

For the certain length criteria I’d do much the same process though I’m not sure what sort of “length” you’re measuring. If you’re looking for a simple number value then that is easy to search upon. You can use a time field to do stuff like track duration though it does tend towards being clock time focused but you can use it for track duration by changing the formatting in the field options.

One last aspect would be that if you want to emulate records in multiple collections, what you can do is a similar approach with the search but instead pair with a multi-value popover. This creates a comma separated field and also populates the saved search field making it easy to create the new saved searches as well. As with the single value popover it is easy to add new entries to it which means you can create a new record, set up extra values and then create a new saved search for it. When you do this make sure you are using “contains” rather than “is”.

The only couple of features that aren’t possible today is automatically setting a value upon creation in a saved search and the other feature I think collections had was it let you do different layouts tied to the collection which Tap Forms can sort of do with multiple custom layouts but the default layout I don’t think will let you hide fields per saved search (though you can do different sorting options).

Hopefully this helps on your Tap Forms journey :)

Screenshots: there is a screenshot of one of my marketplace searches for “eBay”, you can see it’s pretty simple. There are two screenshots of my forms and some saved searches. You can see my “Purchases” form has a grouping for marketplace as well as some searches for data hygiene (records missing images for example) and the other screenshot is my orders category which has a couple of forms in it but also has a similar marketplaces sort of example, search for items purchased this year, orders without a marketplace set, orders without any shipments, recently delivered orders and recently updated orders (that’s just a sort option for using date modified rather than my order date field). The orders stuff is also in it’s own form category which is the “Orders” heading at the very top above the “Orders” form (a little confusing but makes sense tome).

tl;dr: saved searches are powerful!

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[Brendan]

In the online user manual that shows you how to migrate from Bento to Tap Forms, there’s a small glossary of terms to help you with the transition:

https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5.3/en/topic/bento-template-importer

Tap Forms isn’t any more difficult to use than Bento IMHO.

Thanks for the detailed explanation Sam. Hopefully that’ll help Stephan understand Tap Forms better. And of course I’m always available here and via email at support@tapforms.com if you have other questions too.

[Stephan Heribert]

Dear Sam, it’s a long time ago in times of digital age to anwers your post. I just wanted to say thank you. Your tips were a great help to me, I’m slowly getting into the app. If I will be able to do my accounting with Tapforms now, I’ll be overjoyed :-) if something doesn’t work, I’ll get in touch here.

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