No devices show in Nearby sync

[stephen dunn]

I Have Tap Forms 5 On iMac, iPad air and iPhone 5. I have the same document open on all three devices. I know they are the same document, I migrated them all from the same dropbox backup of the iMac and gave them all the same name. I choose preferences, Sync, Nearby, No devices shown,I click the plus sign, no devices show. My device names are 17 and 13 characters long including spaces, no punctuation. I haven’t set any passwords. I was getting on really well with Tap Forms HD and recommending it to friends. Please someone give me a reason to recommend tf5.
Steve

[Brendan]

Hi Stephen,

The real test to see if all the documents are a copy of the exact same document is to go to the Cloud sync screen and check the Database name property on all devices. If you see that database name that begins with “db-….” have different values, then you don’t have the same document on each device.

Migration should be done on only ONE device, then the already migrated document should be copied around to all the other devices. It’s that database name (not the name of the document file) that Tap Forms uses to know if the same document is opened on another device on the network.

[stephen dunn]

Tap forms used to be so easy to work with. What am I doing wrong that this version won’t work?

To send a document to another device:
Ensure the receiving device is within Wi-Fi range and Tap Forms is open.CHECK
Launch Tap Forms for Mac, if not already open.CHECK
Launch Tap Forms for iOS, if not already open.CHECK
Close any document you might have open currently on any iOS devices you want to send to.CHECK
Close the document on the Mac that you want to send. Otherwise the Share button will be disabled.CHECK
On the Database Documents window, select a document from the list of files.CHECK
Click the Share button at the bottom of the window.CHECK
Click the image of the nearby device to which you want to send the selected database
document.CHECK
Click Select. This may take a moment or two. The Select button will change to Waiting.CHECK
On the receiving device, [A window says”If you accept this file, it will be downloaded to your device and displayed in the Documents list”. that is what I want.] click Accept.CHECK
THEN NOTHING – No documents are displayed in my document list. I have tried several times with different devices but no document has ever been downloaded. What am I missing?

[Brendan]

The piece of the puzzle that may be causing a problem is whether or not you have the latest versions of the operating systems. Do you have both macOS Sierra and iOS 10? Or are you trying to send from iOS 9 to iOS 10? If you don’t have the latest operating systems for each device that you’re trying to send to, then it won’t work. There was something that got changed at the operating system level which is preventing the connection from being established. The workaround is to use iTunes File Sharing and to copy the .tapforms documents to your iOS devices that way. See attached image of where they need to go in iTunes File Sharing.

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[stephen dunn]

Thank you Brendan but I still cannot get tap forms 5 to send a document to another device. I am completely up to date with all operating systems, In fact updating to Sierra took me back a step. With Yosemite I could at least see a list of devices that I couldn’t send to, now even that has gone. I tried the iTunes work around but the Tap Forms database document is stored under a different name than the name shown in the Database documents list. I have no idea where that document is stored and cannot search for its because I don’t know what it is called, apart from it begins with “db…” which a lot of documents do. To use the iTunes file share work around; How do I find out what the document is named? how do I find out where it is stored so that I can point iTunes at it?
How do I remove Tap Forms 5 and continue with Tap forms HD?

Steve

[Brendan]

Hi Stephen,

Take a look at the screenshot I attached to the previous reply to this topic. You’ll see what iTunes File Sharing looks like with a bunch of .tapforms documents there. But if you have macOS Sierra and iOS 10 on your devices, then the file transfer function should work fine. I did have one customer who had a problem with this because they had more than one device on the network with the same name. Once we figured out that problem and she renamed one of her devices, it started to work after that.

There’s an app you can download called Bonjour Browser that you can use to look at the services running on your network. When Tap Forms is running on each device, you’ll see an entry on the network showing that.

You can download it from here: http://www.tildesoft.com

Here’s an example of what it looks like on my network when I have Tap Forms opened on my Mac (called Voyager) and my iPhone 7 (called iPhone 7). See attached image.

You’ll see a section called _tapforms-doctx which is what displays the devices waiting for a connection to support the “Send Document” function. You should see an entry within that for each device that’s running Tap Forms. Maybe that’s not showing all devices running Tap Forms on your network?

I would also try rebooting all of your devices to see if that fixes the problem for you.

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[stephen dunn]

Thank you Brendan,
I don’t know what happened. Every day I turned on my computer and my iPad, I checked for updates to Sierra – none. I checked for updates to IOS – none I checked for updates to Tap forms on both – None. Then I tried to send a file from Tao Forms on iMac to iPad but no devices show. I would try again before turning everything off. On the 6th day exactly the same routine but this time the iPad shows up in the devices. I send my main file to the iPad and it works, so I turn on the iPhone and it immediately shows up in the devices and I send a file. I update a few forms and they sync almost immediately. Maybe it is something to do with my wi-fi but everything else is connecting ok. All sorted now – I have come to rely on Tap forms for keeping track of all sorts of stuff and will continue to recommend it, so thank you for your patience.
Steve

[Brendan]

Hi Steve,

Awesome! I’m glad it’s working now.

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