Minimizing TapForms Client Data Storage Requirements

[Kurtois]

Let’s assume a user wants to store photos in TapForms. Also assume the user wants to view their data through TapForms on a Macintosh machine, as well as iOS devices.

Can this be accomplished without burdening storage on the system drive of the macOS machine?

Please let me know if I may clarify my question.

[Sam Moffatt]

In a multi-device world, I don’t think there is a good way of offloading the blob storage in Tap Forms with version 5. You could store links to photos within TF using the website that takes someone out to an S3 bucket for example and if you’re purely on a single device you can link attachments to a record easily. However right now integration with a cloud storage provider for sync that doesn’t result in a full copy of the document being made available locally (including all attachments/photos) doesn’t exist.

There was a similar thread on the implications of hosting a document on the NAS and references to external documents that was in a similar vein. I think integration for blob storage to an S3 compatible service would be a neat addition and would mean that you could download all of the metadata but leave attachments on a central server or cloud provider.

[Kurtois]

I wanted to get more detail on this sentence: “You could store links to photos within TF using the website that takes someone out to an S3 bucket for example and if you’re purely on a single device you can link attachments to a record easily.”

1.
In my situation, I have many photos of the same physical item. So, one item will have many photo records for a single item. Can you perhaps expound on the solution you suggest with my requirement in mind?

2.
I am a little confused by “single device”. Are you envisioning a user with a macOS version of Tap Forms using one Macintosh solely?

[Sam Moffatt]

1. Conceptually instead of adding the photos to Tap Forms and leveraging the built in functionality which would copy the photo into the document, you upload it to a third party service like S3 that then hosts the file. That gives you a link to the file that you can then include in a website field within Tap Forms. If you have many photos of the same item, I’d suggest that you use a table field where each image file you upload to S3 becomes an entry (Daniel does this and posted one script on opening attachments easily from a table). The image hosting service is somewhat immaterial, so long as you get a link to navigate to it that works on all of your devices. I picked S3 because there are plenty of resources out there on getting started with S3 and it’s relatively inexpensive all told.

2. Yes, a single user with the macOS version of TF running on a single device can use the feature of the attachment field that allows you to do an “add file alias” which doesn’t trigger a copy of the file into the document however this doesn’t work properly when you move to another Mac and obviously can’t work on iOS. That said in the NAS use case if they don’t have concurrent editing on the NAS, it would probably be ok for it to be shared on the NAS rather than use sync directly but there are not protections against concurrent editing so it could ultimately end up corrupted.

This is I think the second or maybe third post recently where this has been raised but adding such a feature is non-trivial so might be something for a later version (TF6?) as it would require rethinking a little how attachments (photos and files in general) are stored and maintained. iCloud could also be an answer as well because I think it has blob storage though obviously that limits cross-user sharing as well plus is one of the more expensive platforms (plus you can only buy 2TB off them).

[Brendan]

If you want to store your .tapforms document on an external drive, you can certainly do that. They’re just folders that have an SQLite and file attachments embedded within it. So you could just save the file somewhere else other than in the default directory that Tap Forms uses on your system volume. The only issue is they won’t show up on the main Database Documents list window if you move them somewhere else. But then you can offload storing them on the main system volume.

Sam was talking more about not storing the photos within the .tapforms document folder itself but online somewhere else in the cloud like Amazon S3 or somewhere else.

[Author]

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