My TF history.

[Glen Forister]

I wanted to revisit some of my older postinst to this forum.  When I click on my name, a list of my postings does show up on a page.   But, they aren’t there because I have to go to an older list and all the older pages are not available.  I think you have a malfunction there to see older postings.

I wanted to see the postings where you described the organization of TF in relation to a spreadsheet, because they aren’t making sense to me right now and I wanted to review that.  Can you describe it again or point me to the postings?

[tonyt]

I have had the same problem and reported this ages ago. I seem to remember Brendan said it was a problem with the forum host provider.?

[Brendan]

Ya, sorry about that. I use the BBPress plug-in for WordPress. I didn’t write the system and am not familiar with the PHP language it uses.

As far as Tap Forms being like a spreadsheet, it’s similar in a way, but not totally. Essentially it would be like a spreadsheet that has the first row having the field names and the rest of the rows being the data. In Tap Forms, the first row would be like all the Fields you define. And the other rows would be the records that you define.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Glen Forister]

Too bad about the function of the history.  I’m glad I’m now keeping notes, but I can’t find those for this early subject.

Inside the Form is good.  It is outside that still puzzles me.
– The first screen that comes up is titled “Database Documents”
– In there I have 2 documents, Home and Samples International.
– The plus at the bottom – is this the only location where you can create a “Document”?
– Going into Home Document, the next screen shows
“My Forms”. Is this a document or a folder for Forms.
The plus on this screen creates Documents apparently according to the plus sign.
So, there are 2 layers where Documents can be created – What is the difference?

In one of those Documents I have all of my Forms because I switch back and forth between subjects and projects constantly and it is very inconvenient to back up the ladder and back down into another document to check a small detail to be inserted into the previous Form.

Unfortunately, now when a backup is performed all my work is in one file and if that file gets corrupted, I’m dead.  And, that file constantly gets bigger.  My backups started at 166 mb and the second backup is only 99.5 mb.  It is now 104 mb.

And, if I want to separate out a database for some reason I can’t do it in Finder, but I have to make an archive of it if I’m not mistaken.  Therefor any file I want to give somebody is in the form of an archive file.  I’ve taken the habit of making archives of my forms frequently if it is an important one.  But, apparently, not every personal setting is contained in an Archive, so that is not good.

So, the original question about spreadsheet similarities about organization refers to the above.  The items I’ve discussed don’t seem to be in the instruction manual that I could find.

Thanks.

 

[Brendan]

You’re getting confused between Documents and Forms. Think of a Document as a file on disk. Think of a Form as just one of many items inside your Document. The [+] button on the main Database Documents screen is not the only place you can create a new document. You can also select New Document from the File menu. It does the same thing.

If you’re at all familiar with Excel, a Document in Tap Forms is analogous to an XLSX file on disk. Inside the Excel XLSX file you can have one or more Worksheets. Those are analogous to a Form in Tap Forms.

The main Database Documents window that you see is just a view to the Tap Forms document files (each with a .tapforms file extension) stored in the Finder. Just like a Word document, an Excel document, a Pages or Keynote document. It’s really no different in Tap Forms. A document is a file on disk. A form is a thing you create inside a document that lets you store your records. You can create as many documents as you like on disk and you can create as many forms as you like inside each separate document.

The My Forms thing is a popup button which lets you choose between My Forms which shows only those forms that have 1 or more records. When you choose All Forms, you can see all the forms in the document, even those with zero records or those you’ve explicitly hidden using the Hide Form option on the Form inspector panel.

The plus button next to the My Forms popup button does not create documents. It creates forms. The tooltip (if you hover over your mouse) even says New Form.

There’s only one single layer where you create documents and one layer where you create forms. They’re not the same thing. I hope I’ve made it a bit more clear here.

An archive file stores pretty much everything you need to re-create a form when imported into another document or given to another person. Yes, there are a few settings which are not stored, but those are things that are most important to just the user interface, such as what was the last form or record that was selected the last time you quit Tap Forms. Those things aren’t something that needs to be stored along with the data (IMHO).

No, the Finder doesn’t know about what’s inside of the .tapforms documents, so it can’t split out one form from one document and put it into another. That’s what archives are for. It would be like saying “Why can’t the Finder take this specific worksheet within my Excel document and move it over to another document?”. Or “why can’t the Finder move a group of photos from inside the Photos app into another place?”. You need to go into those applications and export your data and then import them into another app or document.

As for the backup sizes, they can vary depending on what you’re doing and if you compact the database and then do a backup. Compacting the database on the Maintenance screen will temporarily create a write-ahead log (WAL) file which could be fairly large. That may have been included within a backup file. If you close that document the WAL file will be removed and that’ll make the .tapforms document smaller. So one backup file could be smaller than a previous backup file. Or maybe you deleted some photos or something like that.

The instructions do talk about documents, forms, records, fields, etc. Also importing and exporting. However, you’re right, Tap Forms Archives are not really mentioned much in the documentation. I’ll have to add a section for that in the Importing and Exporting areas.

Hopefully I’ve cleared some things up.

If you have any more questions about this or any other aspect of Tap Forms, please don’t hesitate to ask. Happy to help

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Brendan.

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