Moving records to other forms.

[bigcaat]

Is there no way to easily (ie: not having to export and re-import) records from one form to another? This is driving me nuts to the point that I may need to look for a new database. This seems like it should be a simple drag and drop, or move/copy pull-down menu.

Thanks,
Caat

[Sam Moffatt]

There are some scripting solutions to copy a record to another form but in general the suggestion is to use saved searches to filter and limit records that are retrieved.

Perhaps you can share a little more about your workflow, what you’re trying to achieve and how moving records between forms solves this for you?

[bigcaat]

I don’t know what a saved search is. I tried to figure that out but couldn’t.

Workflow: for instance, I have a form that I made for students and people interested in certain classes. Now, however, my student list has gotten so large that I want to separate the interested records from the actual students.

I duplicated the form, thinking I would just delete the unwanted records from each to make them separate, but duplicating the form did not duplicate them with the records.

Another example: I have a client’s form. In that form I have room for 5 photos of the animals I work with. However, when I have a client who acquires more animals than I can fit in the record, rather than just continually adding photo sections that would be added to all my records, which I don’t want, I would like to create a form for those people. Okay, so I create the form but there is no way to get all of their information in their record into the new form except for cutting and pasting it all, as well as going to have to search for the photos and reimport them.

I really don’t understand. I really have liked this database, but this seems like *such* an obvious feature that’s been overlooked. I can’t be the only one that would like to copy or move a record to a new form.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[Sam Moffatt]

Ok, so you’re starting with a form and you’re looking to denormalise some data out into a new structure. I’d probably personally use a form script to do the heavy lifting during a data migration but I think what will work best for you is using the export functionality to export the set of records you want to put in the other forms and then reimport it.

One thing is I suspect you’ll want to link these records once you split them apart. If you don’t have some sort of unique key for the records (student ID, client ID, etc), then I’d add one. A really quick way of doing it is to use a calculation field with the function UUID() in it and make sure the type is “Text”. That’ll give you a unique ID so that we can join it later. This might be unnecessary but I change the type to text once it’s generated since I don’t intend to keep using this field.

Next step is to export the records and fields, including our unique field. If you want to export a subset, you’ll need to do a saved search to filter out the ones you’re interested in (should be a funnel icon on the top right next to the search box). If you do File > Export > Records then you’ll get a dialog where you can select the fields you want to bring to your new form. Don’t tick “Export record ID” and “Export linked records” but you will want to tick “Field type tags” and “Export media”. Hit Export and select a folder to send the export the files. You’ll get a CSV file created with a folder full of images to use.

Next step is to import them into your new form. File > Import > Records will let you import to an existing form or even create a new form for you. Choose the CSV file that we just created and then choose the photo folder it would have exported (if you exported a photo field). I always tick the “add missing fields to form” option even though TF should match the field names automatically, it’s useful to have the extra field to understand what went wrong.

That should populate your other form with a bunch of records (yay) though they’re obviously not inherently connected to your old records (boo!). Make sure everything is where you expect it to be though nothing should change (famous last words). This is where the “Link to Form” field type in “JOIN” mode helps us out. Add it to your main form, where it has “Link to Form”, select your target form, click on “JOIN” and then pick the unique ID field (either one you had already or the one just created) and Tap Forms will link those records together for you.

I’d also created a second link to form field with the link type that makes sense for you (either one to many or many to many) so that moving forward you use this field to link the data together. The JOIN field requires both records share a common value and in the long run when you’re not importing data that’s a bit of work. Creating a TF managed link to form field will handle creating the linking metadata between the records for you with some extra UI functionality for picking records, creating them and a bunch more. You can use a script to automate migrating the JOIN’d records, do it manually, or just leave the JOIN field in place and update as you go.

That should enable you to export your data and import it to new forms relatively easily, perhaps not quite as easy as drag and drop but I don’t think it’s an insurmountable problem.

I have a video on leveraging link to form fields that might help you out as well as it covers a couple of different use cases. My channel has a few different videos that might give you some ideas on how you can model your data and make good use of Tap Forms.

[Brendan]

Hi Caat,

Saved Searches are easy to create and are a great way of creating subsets of your records based on the information you already have in your form.

If you wanted to have lists of students who are interested in one class or another, I’m assuming that you have a Pick List or something like that which lets you identify these students? If so, then you can use the values from that Pick List to filter the list of records.

So for example, if you have students who are interested in a Programming class, then click on the form with all the students, then click the search filter button just to the left of the main Search field. You’ll see a popup appear. Click on the field from the list of fields contains the Interested in values. Then type in a value that you want to search that field for.

Click the Save button and Tap Forms will save that search for you and display it beneath the form.

I understand that you don’t want to have so many different photo fields for the different types of records. In Tap Forms 5 you can have a single Photo field that can contain as many photos as you like, so you don’t have to keep creating multiple Photo fields to hold more than one photo.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Author]

Posts