Pre-sales questions…

[Thierry Dupont]

Hi,
pre-purchase questions:

1) i understand this is not a Bento support forum, but with the upgrade to Yosemite i can’t open my .bentodb file anymore and realise it’s about time i say farewell once and for all to Bento. Moreover, if i can’t recover that Bento db in the first place, there won’t be much need for Tapforms for me anymore of course. So, would you have any tips or ideas as to which would be the best way to try and recover my Bento database? :-//

2) does Tapforms support smartlists like bento did? A smartlist is a subset of the main database based on one or a combination (AND, OR, ….) of several filters.
For example: I had a smartlist that showed only my prospects (potential customers) which were not tagged as lost yet, AND of which the “recall date” field was set to today or a date later than today…
Is this possible?

3) Which brings me to a last question: is the parameter ‘today’s date’ available when creating calculations based on date & time?

Your feedback would be much appreciated and will hopefully help me move forward and come back and purchase a Tapforms licence really quickly!

Thierry

[Brendan]

Hello Thierry,

Thanks for your interest in Tap Forms.

1. I think the best thing to do to open your Bento database is to find a non-Yosemite Mac and then export the template file for each of your libraries from there. Once you have a .bentotemplate export file, you can directly import that into Tap Forms and it will import your database, your records, any related data you have and your photos.

2. Yes, Tap Forms has Saved Searches which are pretty much exactly that. You can create searches which you can later click on to re-execute at any time later. Searches contain one or more search rules which you can use to target specific fields to do exactly what you’re asking. For example, you can do a search that combines the following rules:

“Movie Title contains Terminator” AND
“Rating is greater than 4”

That’s just one example of course. All the rules are ANDed together though. If you want to do an OR query, you can do it within the search term like this:

“Movie Title contains Terminator OR Hunger”

You can also search using the “is today” comparison. There are also other comparisons such as “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, “last week”, “this month”, “next week”, “this year”, “last year”, and so on.

3. Using the function $now you can get Tap Forms to insert today’s date and time into a calculation formula. For example, to calculate the age of a person, you can create a formula like:

($now – Birth Date) / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365.25

Hope that answers your questions.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Thierry Dupont]

Hi Brendan,

Wow! Love that fast reply… especially when it’s all positive news :)

Assuming it’s possible to just copy a bento database to another Mac (and have it working on that other Mac, just like that) then i’m all thrilled and excited to become a Tapforms user really soon! Hopefully today.

You may end up with an enoooormous amount of new customers very soon. At around midnight CET i started to find more and more queries such as mine all over the internet from people who can’t access their Bento DB’s anymore because of a Yosemite upgrade. For the time being you seem to bring the only viable solution that doesn’t force one to move all the way to Filemaker.

Brace yourself! :-)

Thierry

[Brendan]

Hello Thierry,

Heheh… well, it will be good if that happens, but if people have a hard time exporting their templates, then it will be difficult to import them into Tap Forms. Hopefully they’ll find a way. I know I had one other customer just today tell me they managed to get their data onto their wife’s older Mac and then export the template. So it should work for you too.

You could also use Parallels to create an OS X Mavericks virtual Mac and install Bento into that. I actually have that setup myself so that I can test Tap Forms with OS X 10.9.

Thanks!

Brendan

[David Butenhof]

By the way … for what it’s worth, Bento is working fine for me on Yosemite and iOS 8, aside from having to accept a weird dialog when first launching it. I don’t know why you’re having problems — and as you say this isn’t the place to troubleshoot Bento.

But it is aging, and I definitely agree it’s time to move on. TapForms still looks like the only viable migration strategy to me, and in many ways a clear improvement.

The only reason I’m still using Bento is that I still have no migration strategy for my Bento Simple Lists. I’d spent some time a while ago trying to write a Python script to re-structure my Bento CSV exports into something TapForms could import; I just wasn’t able to get it to work, and haven’t had time to try again.

[1Levite]

Hi Thierry:

If you get really, really, stuck, you might be able to adapt some of the instructions posted on Brendan’s blog to recover much of the Bento information–if you have a recent backup. If you’re a risk taker, you can probably do the steps with your “live” data file and maybe get all of it. Here’s the link to the blog:

Exporting photos from Bento

When I went from Bento to TF just over a year ago (before Brendan released the Bento import feature), I successfully completed the steps in the link above, but realized that duplicating the same flat structure from Bento was dumb given the functionality of TF.

I ended up exporting CSVs from Bento and built up the TF import files to take advantage of TF features. After that, I never turned back.

I have no idea if the steps above are still valid today–maybe some of the more experienced Participants can chime in on that one.

By far, the easiest is to get Bento running in Yosemite or in a virtual Mac and use the import function to TF. Good Luck!

[Thierry Dupont]

Hi All,

just to let you know that Brendan’s suggestion to copy the bentodb file to another non-yosemite Mac with bento installed did the trick perfectly.

I was amazed and very pleasantly surprised to discover how good Tapforms is at importing not only my Bento records but he entire layout of my Bento forms as well.

As far as i’m concerned i have just few small questions / requests which, if positively answered, might allow me to get rid once and for all of both Bento AND Podio, but that will be subject of a separate topic in the Forum.

Thanks you all for your very useful contributions.

[Author]

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