Desperately needed features

[LeoC2]

At the risk of repeating myself I feel TapForms is in need of two very important features.

1) If a field has a pop-up we should have the OPTION to set that field to REQUIRE the pop up use and not allow manual entry. My people in the field are having a lot of trouble in this area and manually entering some data which throws off the records.

2) We should have the OPTION of REQUIRING select fields to contain data. Again, my people in the field sometimes don’t tap to save an entry and we wind up with a blank field. Not good! If there was a warning that data is required they could go back and correct the error.

These two features are pretty basic to every database and form entry program I know of. I think it’s about time TF had these two basic features implemented. PLEEEEESE!

[Brendan]

Hi Leo,

Thanks for the feature requests. I agree, it would be good to have these features. Wanna build them for me? :-) Just kidding.

You know it’s not that I don’t want to add them, it’s just that I’m really in the thick of my new upgrade right now as well as bug fixing the current versions when the need arises, responding to posts and comments on the forum, supporting customers via email, etc. There’s things I’ve wanted to add to Tap Forms that I imagined building from the very first day I even thought about what kind of app to build that haven’t yet made it in yet. And that was 8 years ago when I was just doing it part time in the evenings and weekends.

So I’ll get there… it’ll just take me a bit more time. Sorry for the delays in adding new features.

Thanks,

Brendan

[LeoC2]

Any update on these possibilities Brendan, especially the ability to REQUIRE the use of the pop up.

Leo

[Brendan]

Hi Leo,

No. Sorry. Nothing yet. I’m still deep in working on my new version.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Iván Benítez]

Hi Brendan,

Will there be a unique data field in the new version? To not create duplicate data, it will be fine. ID card for people, it is a good example.

I have OSX, iPad and iPhone version!!! :-) Please, please!

Thank you.
Iván

[Brendan]

Ivan,

In order to provide this kind of ability, Tap Forms would have to fundamentally change the way viewing and editing the form’s contents behave. I have been thinking about making this change, but I don’t know how people would react to it. What I would need to do is have an Edit/Save button at the record level. So when you view a record, you would not be able to make any changes to it unless you clicked the edit button. Then when you made your changes, you would click the Save button to save the changes for that record. At that point, Tap Forms would scan for incomplete values and mark the fields (probably with a red border or something) telling the user they’ve missed some information. So more like a website form that you fill out rather than a desktop app.

But then this becomes problematic for the multi-column list view where you can simply click on a cell and start typing to change its value. I would have to have a toggle up there for that too.

So it’s a bit of a complicated thing for me to build because I’m not entirely sure what the right user experience should be to support required fields.

One possibility is to simply mark every required field with some indicator (like a * or something) and that’s it, but that wouldn’t prevent you from leaving out the data from a required field.

Now, after re-reading your question, you were asking about Unique fields. That’s entirely altogether different. Sorry about the message above, but it’s a good discussion to have regardless. I guess the only thing with unique fields is that every time you save a value I have to scan all the other records to make sure you’ve never used that value before. I’ll think about that.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Iván Benítez]

Brendan,

I’m sorry, yes it is another request totally different but how you were talking about “new features…”

An idea would be a checkbox at the create/edit field view. So if I have marked a field, you have to scan ONLY that kind of field. This save a lot of time and other people who don’t need this feature will have a software as fast as always.

What do you think?

I record personal data of hundred people and I can’t remember if I have recorded a person or not. So we have to search his name and then update information or create a new one. This is a waste of time for us :-)

Thank you.
Iván

[DrJJWMac]

@LeoC2

1) I agree. Popups should have a mode to work strictly to restrict inputs only to the possible popup values. However, they should also work so that users can enter other values when this could be desired. Perhaps this might call for a checkbox that says “[ ] Do not allow user input” or “[ ] Restrict input only to popup values” as part of the design of the popup field.

2) I agree that this would be nice. Users should get a warning when a required field is empty. A hack might be …

* Create a calculation field that checks for the number of characters in the required text field(s). Toggle a different field between COMPLETE or NOT COMPLETE depending on the return value of that calculation.

I don’t know whether this is possible because I don’t happen to have TF open right now.

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