Bento import inconsistency: Image vs file fields

[PierreBn]

Hi,
I just noticed a “hidden” potential problem with the Bento import function.

Bento allowed to store multi-pages PDF in an Image type field. This was a clear plus for me: it allowed storing a full document in Bento, while still visualising the first page cover when going through records.

I imported my Bento DB. The Bento image field became an image field in TF (as expected).
My PDFs have been fully preserved; in fact, the imported records behave just like in Bento: I can see the first page, and if I click to view the “image” (PDF), I can still see all pages.
However, this does not seem the standard behaviour for Image Fields in Tap Form: when dragging a new PDF to an image field, it only keeps the 1st page.

I can’t criticise TF for only keeping the first page (after all, storing a full PDF in an image field was kind of a trick). However, this is misleading for people like me who assumed we could continue to do that (I have already lost some PDFs, where only the first page was preserved).

In a nutshell:
– Maybe you’d like to make sure those imported Bento PDFs with multiple pages, stored in image fields, are preserved in future updates (otherwise people will complain about loss of data).
– Maybe you should automatically convert Image fields from Bento, where some records have PDFs instead of actual images, as “file attachment fields” (therefore enforcing the logical TF policy (“an Image IS NOT a PDF”).
– Maybe either implement a message warning when dragging PDFs with multiple pages to an image field, or simply refuse PDFs in image fields. Although TF accepts the PDFs there is no notification that all subsequent pages are being erased.
– I would appreciate a “save as” option also for image fields. For the moment, I need to dig in the TF folders to find my PDFs, and properly transfer them to a clean new “File attachment” field. Also, some people may sometimes need to simply export a normal picture for further use.

Yet another special case for you Brendan ;)
Pierre

[Brendan]

Hi Pierre,

This is interesting. I had never tried importing a PDF file into a Photo field. I made a Photo field with the intention of storing photos in it. However, I don’t believe I am actually doing anything that would intentionally strip out the other pages of a PDF when added directly in Tap Forms. I will look into this. It’s possibly a good idea to convert the PDFs into File Attachments instead of putting them into a Photo field. Thanks for the suggestion.

And thanks for the other suggestions too. A Save as would be good. However, you can just drag and drop the photo to your desktop to get the file out too.

Thanks!

Brendan

[PierreBn]

Dragging the image out to save it…should have thought about it before, thanks!

About PDFs dragged into Image fields:
Interesting that you didn’t program the stripping of PDFs down to the first page…TF does it quite swiftly and discreetly !
I checked: the resulting file is indeed just a single JPG image, it is not (as I had hoped) the multi-page PDF simply renamed as JPG.

Problem is, apart from people like me (doing it voluntarily as a bad habit from Bento); many more might do it absentmindedly, and only realise later that they lost all subsequent pages…
The fact that – in the case of Bento imports – the PDFs are kept intact with all pages, adds to the potential confusion for beginners.

But again, I insist and agree: putting PDFs in image field is bad, I’m sure you’ll find a way to prevent us from doing that, while dealing with the over-tolerance of Bento in that matter ;-)

[Brendan]

In my code when you click on the “open folder” button to select a new image, I have this code which limits which kinds of files you can select:

NSString *extensions = @"png/PNG/tiff/tif/TIFF/TIF/jpg/jpeg/JPG/JPEG";

However, it would seem that when you drag in an image from the Finder or another app, it’s not using that code to limit what files you can set on a Photo field.

[Brendan]

Well I looked through my drag and drop code and it is actually converting whatever image you dragged in into a JPEG. So I’m just working on fixing that now.

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