Feature Requests

[James Hayes]

Here are a couple of things that would push TapForms

• Access to Child calculation fields from a Parent form. As an example this would allow a linked payment table to pass up the sum of payments for display and use in a calculation on the parent form.
• Locked fields on a form to prevent modification (e.g. Last Modification Date, ID field)
• Required fields.
• Option to Hide the Default Form.
• Option to set the form that is opened when a row in the a child table is double- clicked.
• Option to restrict a pop-menu to the list of lookup fields and not allow for new entries.

I know you have a lot going on with the move to CouchBase and maintaining all three versions, so this is more of a lobby. It’s a top notch product all the way around. Some of these may be repeat requests by others.

[Brendan]

Hi James,

Thanks for the feature requests.

When you double-click on a child form, the last selected layout of the child form is already selected for you. The form that’s selected corresponds to the child table’s form. So that’s already set for you. Perhaps you were confusing form and layout :)

Required fields is actually more complicated than it sounds. It would require a fundamental shift in the way data is entered into Tap Forms. For example, when you visit a website to fill out a form, there’s always a submit button somewhere on the form that you click on to send the form. At that moment it does validation and then returns a page with the missing fields marked. So Tap Forms would probably need to adopt something similar. You would need to have two modes of operation; 1. Edit and 2. Save. That would also need to apply to 3 different views. The Default Layout view, all your custom layouts, and the multi-column list view. You would also have to be prevented from moving to another form if you didn’t first save and/or deal with the form you were currently editing (from whichever view). Alternatively I could just mark required fields with a red border, but not actually enforce anything. It would be more of a visual indicator letting you know which fields you’re “supposed” to fill in.

The Default Layout doesn’t really need to be hidden I don’t think because as long as you have a custom layout, Tap Forms will always display the last selected layout. So just never select the Default Layout if you never want to use it.

I’m working on the option to restrict the Pick Lists to only the set of values you’ve specified.

So I guess with the Locked fields option, how would you propose you edit them if you needed to change their value? Or is it a once set, tough luck sort of thing? :)

Thanks!

Brendan

[James Hayes]

I agree you can just ignore the default forms, but they are just in the way if you have a custom form. If TapForms is set up for someone else to use they can get lost when they click on the default form and don’t know how to get back to where they were.

ID, creation date, modification date don’t need to be edited. I know the date fields were not editable in Bento. An option is to make read-only fields editable in the default form, but not the others.

No matter how implemented validation should be available as it helps to guarantee record completeness.

One option is have Save and Cancel buttons that are enabled when a field is edited forcing the user to acknowledge that changes were made. Another option is to run the validation as soon as a field is exited or there is an attempt to change records. Being able to make a change without committing is not optimal if database completeness is the goal. Of course if someone wants to use it as is then they not have any validation.

Thanks.

[Brendan]

The Date Created and Date Modified fields in Tap Forms are not editable. Nor is a Number field if you have the auto-increment option turned on, and nor is a Calculation field.

[Brendan]

Hope you don’t mind, but I edited your first post to add a couple of missing html tags. The missing ul and /ul tags were causing some display anomalies.

[James Hayes]

My oversight on the existing locked fields.

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