crashed and gone on OSX

[Jo Haegeman]

Hi,

I’ve just started using TF this week (demo version) and bought the full app today.
Imported 4 bento templates. 2 of the forms I have already adapted where needed, they’re working fina.
When I started on the largest form (2500 records), TF was a lot slower, and when I edited some fields, it crashed.
Now it won’t start up again.
TF opens, and I can use the menu’s, but I can’t see the app itself.
Also, it doesnt recongise the backup I made just prior to start working on the 3rd form, so I can’t restart from there.

I deleted the original app and downloaded and installed a new one. I restarted the laptop a couple of times, etc.
Working on Macbook air osx 10.9.2.

Any ideas?

[Brendan]

Hi Jo,

I’m sorry for this bad experience you’ve had.

One of the issues is the single-column list view right now is behaving slowly because Tap forms is now computing the height of every row in the form before it displays them to you. This is too time consuming. I am working on some performance enhancements for that problem right now. The solution is to switch to single-column list view under the View menu (or click the button in the toolbar). It will operate much much faster then.

When it opens and you can use the menus but not the app itself, does the screen just look all grey? Or is there no window there at all? If there’s just a grey screen, it means the forms list on the left is collapsed. To show that again, select the “Show Forms List” from the View menu.

If it’s not showing any window at all, please enter this command into the Terminal application and then restart Tap Forms:

defaults delete com.tapforms.mac

Thanks,

Brendan

[Jo Haegeman]

Hi Brendan,

Thank you for the quick reply. Pasting the code in terminal was the solution.
TF is indeed very slow, it would be nicer to have it work faster.
I do hope this will turn out to be a worthy substitute for bento, since we need a smooth running, easy, and cheap dbase for my small company.

Also, 2 more questions
– since I imported from bento, the addresses have not been imported. Is there a way I can import these seperately and add them to the records in TF? I would hate to add over 3500 adressess manually.
– is there a way to easily convert check marks into multiple choicelists ?

Thanks.

[Brendan]

Hello Jo,

I would really recommend switching to multi-column list view for now until I can get an update out which improves the performance of single-column list view.

1. The Address list is one of the fields I haven’t yet supported. You could export them as a CSV file from Bento and then import into your form. However, you’d need to delete the current records in your form. Or you could just duplicate the form and experiment by importing into that one. Tap Forms will create the extra fields from the address list field.

2. Sorry, there’s not.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Jo Haegeman]

Hi Brendan,

It seems I have to choose:
– or I import through a bento form, and I import the related datafields as well (the links to other forms). But then I lose the adresses.
– or I import through a .csv and then I can import the adresses, but I lose the related data fields.
At least, that’s what after some experimentation I seem to be confronted with.
Or am I doing something wrong?

Kind regards,
Jo

[Jo Haegeman]

One more question:

in the related fields table overview (so in ‘Project form’, which has a link with ‘team form’): if I change the column order, and the columns that I want to be there (because I only need the name and telephone, not all the 40 fields of the team form), it doesn’t stay that way when I quit and restart TF.
Is there a ‘lock this layout’ button somewhere I’m missing?

Thanks.

[Jo Haegeman]

never mind that last question, all is well. (impossible to delete a post?)

[Brendan]

Hi Jo,

No worries. If you’d like me to delete your previous post I can do that.

As for your choice to make post, yes, you have it right. I understand that’s not ideal and it would be better if I supported the Address import for the Bento templates. I know it’s something I need to work on.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Frank Tikket]

Jo, the solution to your address import is to first export your bento data into an excel/numbers file. From there, bento breaks out the street/city/state/zip… you want to create a new column that has a formula to merge the 4 cells into one so that the full address is one cell.

From there you can import the address as location and with the latest update it will locate each address without GPS coordinates.

Simple as that! :-)

[Jo Haegeman]

Hi Frank,

Thank you for that solution.
However, as I mentioned above, I chose to import the bento files with the related data fields.
So importing a complete .csv file now would delete those related data fields.
Is there a way to just import the location fields and add them to the existing records?

[Brendan]

Hi Jo,

Unfortunately Bento won’t export the unique identifiers that identify a specific record when using the CSV export option. If it did, you could create a file with the unique identifiers in one column and the combined address (as Frank suggested – thanks Frank!) in the other column and then import that into the same form. The header row in the CSV file would have to have the unique identifier column be called “form_record_id” and the other column would be the address field.

For example:

form_record_id,Address
bento_id_1234,”123 Tap Zapp Way, Calgary, AB, Canada”

and so on.

Tap Forms will update a record when it has a unique identifier in that specifically named column and it’s able to find one in the current form.

But I don’t think this bit of information will help for this problem because of Bento’s lack of support for exporting unique identifiers. It does export them when exporting a Bento Template. Just not in the CSV file exports.

Thanks,

Brendan

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