contacts

[paulwebb]

Great to be back with tapforms.
the contact chooser is great but I have run into a problem.
When i have several contacts with the last name
e.g Mrs Wood, Mrs T Wood Mr Wood
when you pick one it will often get one of the others. I have overcome this at the moment by giving each one an initial.
This is not practical for existing customers.
Any ideas.

[Brendan]

Hello Paul,

Tap Forms uses the first and last name as a unique identifier when searching the contact database. I realize that’s not an ideal situation, but due to synchronization of contacts, it was not possible to use the internal ID for the contacts anymore since they could change after a sync. I know, this seems strange, but that’s Apple’s code.

So Tap Forms will search the contact database for a contact with the first and last name. Do you not have the first names in the database? Or do you just have “Mrs Wood”, “Mr Wood”?

Thanks,

Brendan

[paulwebb]

I see, other apps place a unique identifier in a separate field in the apple contacts. Example for us is pocket infomant.
Strange that apple make database integration so difficult, its the same for filemaker, bento and the rest. Wake up apple. Some of us run businesses.

[Brendan]

Which field do they put the unique identifier in? Is it just the Notes field or something like that? I know in the OS X SDK you can add fields to the address book, but I don’t think you can do that in the iOS contacts database.

But ya, it’s silly the way it works. I had a chat with an Apple engineer at WWDC who worked on Address Book and he said the reason it’s done the way it is is because they get contact data from all kinds of different systems (vCards, Exchange servers, etc.). So there’s no common unique identifier. But ya, if I could put the Tap Forms unique ID into the contact database, that’d probably solve the problem.

I’ll look into it though.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brendan]

Although thinking about that, it could get messy too. If I were to add a unique ID to the contact record as you selected them, what if you selected someone else? I’d have to remove the ID from the old contact and add it to the new one. But that gets tricky when dealing with sync. If you were to select the same contact on two different devices, then sync the devices, you could have a conflict because now the same contact has two different unique Tap Forms IDs associated with it.

Tricky.

Brendan

[paulwebb]

yes I see the prob. How do pocket informant get over it?
One more question, I have put my forms in all forms is there away of loading them into my forms and what is the difference please.
Paul

[Brendan]

I’m not sure how Pocket Informant handles it. I’ll have to download it and see if I can figure it out.

Any form which has at least one record in it will automatically show up in the My Forms area. The All Forms area displays forms with or without records in them.

Brendan

[Author]

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