How to search for data in linked fields when it doesn't show up?

[Carol Jones]

You helped me with an earlier question about my TapForms database and now I have another question. I have this main/major/parent form that is a list of members, artists and interested people of our nonprofit arts organization which contains contact information and other stuff imported from an old filemakerpro database when we first started using TapForms in May of 2018.

I created a new form that is a record of memberships and donations some people in this list have paid. There is a linked field in the parent form showing the data/amounts they have paid, dates they paid, type of payment, check number, etc. There is also an “inverse relationship” field in the memberships and donations table/form that brings in the phone number and email and company name, etc. from the parent form so we can see more information about who paid. This is nice. Works fine.

I had asked you in an earlier question about changing the type of relationship link in the parent form and I understand your answer but have not changed the type of link yet. I am putting it off to ask this NEW question.

Sometimes I want to search in the parent form for a person who has paid between certain dates, or paid a certain amount and it is impossible because the data in the linked field, which is a table when viewing the form, is not visible in the list of fields that I can search on.

Also, I recently created a yet another child form/table of items in a specific event (a gallery show of artists’ work) that were submitted by some of the people/artists in the parent list, about 55 items (sometimes one person has submitted more than one item). There is a linked field in the parent form where we can enter the item numbers and specifics about the items submitted by the artists, and there is an “inverse relationship” field in the item list showing the artist name and company and address from the parent form (or whatever I choose to show). All works fine, I was able to create a price list of the items and we have been able to adjust things just fine. Beautiful.

However, just like the above mentioned impossibility, if I want to search in the item list for information about the artists who have submitted items, that is impossible because none of the artist information is visible in the search. I realize I can search and find items in the form showing the artist information and can go to that individual record with the little arrow, one by one, but that is rather tedious.

I read about how you were going to add some javascript capability (I do not write javascript myself at all) and I was wondering if this new functionality would make it possible to do what I want to do, and if so how and who could do it?

Is it going to be impossible forever or is there something simpler that I can do?

Thank you for the new update/upgrade(s), I love TapForms and love that you are keeping up with the Mac OS updates. I would love it more if I could do what I want to do.

Your fan,

Carol Jones

[Brendan]

Hi Carol,

I’ve already added the JavaScript support to Tap Forms. I suppose you could do something to pull data into the parent record which you could then search on from the parent. You would just need to create a Script field in your form, write some code to extract out the data from the Link to Form field’s sub-fields, then return that value. It would display in the parent form. Then you could create a Saved Search that scanned that data. It would probably be for a very specific search that you’d want to do rather than being able to search any sub-field on the child form.

I haven’t written any code to create Saved Searches that can query the child relationships on a parent form directly.

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