Relations — how to do a "table join."

[Gary Bloom]

I’m not an expert on relational DBS but, in order to not duplicate fields, I recall being able to join tables but way of key fields. Here’s what I’m trying to do in Tapforms:

Customer Table: with the usual name, address, email, etc fields.

Invoice Table: with invoice items and calculations.

What I can’t figure how to do is have the needed invoice fields — address, etc — be automatically populated by the Customer Table.

[Brendan]

Hi Gary,

Relationships in Tap Forms are managed manually by you by either adding child records to a parent form or selecting existing child records to link to a parent form when using a many-to-many Link Type. There’s no function to join forms based on any criteria. But it’s something I would like to add in a future update.

Attached to this reply is a modified version of the Clients form that ships with Tap Forms that includes a link to the Expenses form. It will hopefully give you an idea of how you could link your forms together.

Thanks!

Brendan

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[Gilles Libert]

Hi Brendan,

Thank you for your fast reply! I must say that I like your app alot. The best thing is that it is an ongoing project with a very active user forum!
When i started to learn TF, I erased all forms. (I am using the demo version to evaluate the app) Could you send the Expenses form too?

I don’t know if I’m getting this right, but when linking forms one to each other, the results are shown in table? Is there a way to only show the content of a cell in this table? This would be very usefull for printing labels.

Join forms based on criteria would be VERY usefull.
Also syncing forms without the iCloud service would be great. You could make this as an inapp purchase…

Keep up the good work!

[Brendan]

Hi Gilles,

On an inverse one-to-many relationship, Tap Forms will display the parent record as a vertical list of fields instead of a table. So that would be helpful for labels. But the inverse of a many-to-many would still be a table.

I would like to add the ability to join forms together based on some criteria. It’s on my long-term to-do list.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Frank Tikket]

I agree that this is a critical part of being able to run a relational database. I would think that most people are using this to professionally manage customer profiles, so to join tables based on key data would make sure that data from both tables is up to date.

The way it is now, I am doing double data entry on both forms and If I update one table it does not update the other.

The loss of this functionality makes me want to scrap the whole relational databases and just “join” info from both tables into one HUGE record. At least it will all be in one place, with the same information.

[Author]

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