I’m a longtime TapForms user on desktop. Took advantage of the BlackFriday Sale today and bought the iOS version. Is there any video or instruction on how to synch it with my desktops? I’m out of office a lot and it would be great to have up to date access to my TapForms that is also on my desktops. I’m looking all over the site and can only find an old iOS manual. Is the new one with newer sync options in a video somewhere? Thank you!
The manual for the desktop covers the sync options and also has some amount of iOS instructions embedded in as well. Most everything is the same setting on both devices with Sync settings being under Preferences on the Mac and Tools on iOS.
I recommend starting with the Nearby Sync, it does require Tap Forms to be open on devices to sync but my workaround for that was to have a Mac with Tap Forms open all the time. I suggest a star topology where you add this one Mac to all of your devices and then the Mac has all of the devices. This helps reduce cross-talk as updates are pulled from the various devices to the Mac and then the devices pull the updates from the single Mac.
Next level up is CouchDB, I just did a video on setting it up on a Mac. I don’t think it’s that hard, it runs quietly in the background, it does still need a computer on but if you can get that setup it’s able to run multiple devices fine. You can also setup SSL with it and run it over the internet as well. IBM Cloudant is a hosted CouchDB server which might be useful for you as well.
Last on the list is the iCloud Sync. It works out of the box but it’s got a bunch of quirks. It’s really easy to enable and will automatically create placeholders on each of your devices. Generally I suggest enabling iCloud sync on an empty document and then switching to using CouchDB sync from there. You can check the forum for other comments on iCloud sync.
Thank you. I have TapForms 5 on 2 desktops (1 at home, 1 at my office), and my files are synched through iCloud. Whenever I make an update to a file at either one, the other location gets/tracks the updates as well. I don’t have the ability to keep a computer on 24/7 so iCloud is the preferable way to go.
I opened one of my desktops and looked at Preferences > Sync, and it is set to iCloud. There is a “document value number” shown that says it must be the same on each device, but when I open my iPhone and go to the TapForms5 iOS app, the Tools > Sync shows a different DVN id value. The iOS also says I have iCloud disabled for TapForms, but when I check it, it IS enabled.
So then I turned on iCloud DRIVE and everything came to life. It downloaded my database, even though it does NOT have the same DVN on my iPhone as on my desktop. So is this possibly one of the quirks you mentioned, that in this case it’s actually working even though the DVN id’s are different?
Again, thank you for your assistance. It is most appreciated!
Hi Jay,
Tap Forms uses the document ID to know what to sync. Even if you have two documents with the same filename, but different document IDs, they will not sync.
So the solution to this is to pick one version of the document and use the Send Document function to send a copy of that document over to your other device.
Tap Forms needs the document IDs to be identical because then it knows its dealing with the same document on different devices. Each object in your database such as a form, a field, a record, a pick list, etc. each have their own unique identifiers. They’re generated randomly by Tap Forms. If you have two different documents, even with the same form names and field names, etc. they will not actually be the same form, field, or whatever.
It’s like the difference between identical twins and someone looking in the mirror. The person looking in the mirror sees himself, the same person. But even though twins look identical, they’re not the same person.
So Tap Forms uses the Document ID to be able to coordinate the syncing of the forms, records, field, etc.
So just pick a document you want to sync and send it over to the other devices you have Tap Forms on.
Hope that makes sense.
Thanks,
Brendan
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