Pick Lists Request

[Jose Monteiro]

Hi Brendan,

With pick lists, sometimes, or many times, it’s difficult to find a short description for the pick list value, allowing us to understand their meaning promptly.

Then we have longer descriptions, meaning wider columns on Multi-Column Views (thats my favorite view) and the need for moving view content left-right to view all data.

To overcome that I use codes on pick lists to reduce columns width.
With the growing number of Documents, Forms and Pick Lists it’s hard to remember all those codes and their meaning.

My suggestion is:
– Allow two fields on a pick list; one for a code and the other for a description.
– Then, when on a form choosing a code value for a field from a pick list, the popover window would show us the available codes and descriptions allowing us to choose the one we want.

Jose

[Mike Schwartz]

Jose,

Would it work to construct your pick list to contain both an initial code and a verbose description? For example:

IOU — flag that I owe someone money, who should be paid soon
DUE — flag that someone owes me money

If your codes are all three characters, then you can set the column width to show only the codes, but when you click on the pick list arrow you’ll see the full description.

As an alternative quick-and-dirty work-around, you can add a custom layout and call it “Pick List Values”. On that layout, you can add a table of pick list codes and descriptions as a static text item (NOT a field). Then you can flip to that layout and use it to jog your memory when needed.

— Mike

[Brendan]

Ya, it would be useful to have the code and a description. It would be most useful if you had it for Number fields because you could have some textual description of what the number value means. Selecting it would only put the number value into the field, but you would get to see what that number value represented.

[Jose Monteiro]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your suggestion.
It’s hard to keep codes to a constant width.
Sometimes 2 letters would be enough, others times a few more (for example part numbers).
I’m not comfortable yet working with layouts.
I hope I will be some day. :)
In fact the Multi-Column List View is my favorite, and it’s the only one I’ve been working with.

Hi Brendan,
If you could do something about that it would be very welcome.

Jose

[Mike Schwartz]

Jose,

Good news! With the release of Tap Forms 5.2.2, there are some new text functions that can help with your use case until such time as Brendan might implement a dual-value (code/description) pick list. I’ll restate my understanding of the requirements:

REQUIREMENTS

1. Select field values from a pick list.
2. The pick list will display both a “short code” and a verbose description as needed.
3. The short codes may not all be the same length.
4. The multi-column list view can cleanly display just the short codes in one of its columns.

SETUP

Here’s an example with two pick list values for “TEXTFIELD1”. Each pick list value has a standard structure: shortcode-space-dash-space-description:

first pick list value: ABC – DescriptionOfWhatABCmeans
second pick list value: VWXYZ – DescriptionOfWhatVWXYZmeans

APPROACH

The goal is to peel off the initial shortcode from TEXTFIELD1, regardless of its length, and have that be the value of a calculation field, SHORTCODE. The approach is to use the new TEXT functions to (1) find the location of the “dash”, (2) calculate the length “N” of the shortcode (it’s the position of the “dash” minus two), and finally (3) set the value of SHORTCODE to the first N characters of TEXTFIELD1.

SOLUTION

The following formula for the SHORTCODE calculation field will accomplish the above:

LEFT(TEXTFIELD1,POS(TEXTFIELD1,"-")-2)

Remember to set the Result Type to Text. Obviously, your short codes cannot themselves contain a “dash” character. But if you really want dashes in your short codes, you could separate the short code and description by something else, maybe space-equals-space instead of space-dash-space.

Then in your multi-column view you would display the SHORTCODE field but not the TEXTFIELD1 field.

Hope that helps,
Mike

[Jose Monteiro]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for these good news that I was not aware of.
It’s a bit late now in Lisbon, but tomorrow I’ll try as you suggested.

Thanks.
Jose

[Jose Monteiro]

Mike,

I’ve just tried these new functions.
They work really well, and are a great help.
Thank you very much for you detailed explanation.

Jose

[Sydney Sauber]

Hi All, As always, Mike has clear, implementable solutions. Brendan, I second the request for a description field on the Pick Lists, and one for the Forms, too.

My work around for tracking which values got to which picklists and which permutations in a slightly different pick list go with which Forms, is so time consuming and cumbersome, because slight changes (as the iterative process refines the form) are complicated to maintain and document. The description field in picklists (and forms) would help a lot!!!! Daylite has something like what we are requesting if you are looking for an example.

Thanks
Sydney

[Brendan]

Hi Sydney,

I used to use Daylite a long time ago. In fact, my first foray into Objective-C programming was to build a plug-in for Daylite. However, I no longer have it, so if you could post a screenshot of what you mean that would be very helpful.

It’s very sad, but unfortunately Mike has passed away just over a week ago :(

Even after he’s gone, his posts are still very useful to every Tap Forms customer. Thanks Mike!

[Author]

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