Search results and QR Code

[Carmen S.]

Hi

Well, I’m new here and it seems I have a lot of questions.

What I found out up to now:
With the basic search it is possible to search through all categories. With the advanced search it shows only the results from the current category.

It is possible to save the results from the advanced search. Is there also a possibility to create a barcode?

I ask because we want to use Tap Forms as an inventory tool. That means we have different entries for e. g. electronic devices or the same for decoration. The real articles are in different boxes and we have a field for the location to see in which box the article is and where the box stands. And it would be great if I just can create a Barcode which leads to the search result of Box 1 etc.

Thank you for your help.

Carmen

[Brendan]

The way the advanced search works is you specify the search rules by picking one or more fields, plus the comparison operators and values to go along with the fields. Then click the Save button. That’ll save the search and display it beneath the form on the left side of the Tap Forms window (Mac version).

The Advanced Search can only search for the selected form because the search itself is stored on the form and all the fields you specify are very specific to the form you’re searching.

Tap Forms Mac can generate barcodes.

https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5/en/topic/barcodes

And Tap Forms for iOS can read barcodes and search for records with matching barcode values.

[Patrick O’Bryan Jr.]

Hello,

First of all, I am new to Tap Forms. So, I am by no means any sort of an expert.

I am attempting to create a database to be used for a small business. I am interested in being able to track our inventory. As such, I have been playing around with the QR Code functions on my Mac and my iPhone.

I want to be able to use my iPhone to quickly locate an item in a number of ways. For example, if it has been listed online, we can scan the QR code off the screen and quickly locate our record of the item so we can ship it and remove it from our inventory once its been sold. A necessary item for this function is a unique inventory or product number for each item in our database. I’ve been experimenting with a number of functions. When I’ve created inventory numbers, the first series of numbers that I created had hyphens (-) in them. When I used the bar code function to generate a QR code, I noticed something happening with the search capabilities on my iPhone. They wouldn’t work. I discovered through trial and error that if I eliminated the hyphen from the identifiers that I generated, the iPhone search would work. I’m not sure what might be happening there. Does the program attempt a computation with the strings because of the hyphens rendering the search useless? I obviously don’t have a clue.

Creating unique inventory/product or stock numbers without hyphens in them “do” generate QR codes that result in valid search functions via the iPhone while tethered to the Mac primary database via iCloud.

I don’t know if this is helpful or not or simply unique to something that I or my system is doing wrong. It did cause me quite a bit of time and frustration. However, I also understand that this is the nature of computing and learning and building new systems.

Be well…

[Brendan]

Hi Patrick,

Tap Forms uses what’s called the SQLite FTS (Full Text Search) engine. In this search engine, certain characters mean certain things. The hyphen (actually a minus sign) means a negative search.

So if you had a unique ID such as ABC-123 and that’s what you were searching for, in terms of FTS, that would be like saying “find everything that has ABC in it, but NOT 123.”

So maybe you could use a different character than a hyphen. Perhaps an em dash instead which would be option hyphen. For comparison, here’s a hyphen followed by an em dash: – –

You can see the em dash is slightly wider.

That could be used instead so as not to invoke the negative term option in the search engine.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brendan]

So it looks like my forum converted the em dash to a character that looks to be the same width as the hyphen. When I typed them out they looked different. But you get the idea.

[Patrick O’Bryan Jr.]

Hello, Brendan,

Thank you for your quick response. I also failed to mention another aspect involved in this. When I use the UUID() calculation function, it generates a unique identifier that is separated by hyphens. This, again, causes the search function to not operate as I intended. Based upon your information, the fix may be in using the LEFT or RIGHT functions to extract only a portion of the randomized number generated by the UUID() function which should be plenty for me as I don’t really have much inventory. The right twelve places is plenty in terms of a unique identifier for items in the inventory as for as the UUID() generator goes. If someone does generate a QR code using the UUID() function and then applies it as an identifier, the search won’t work unless the hyphens are extracted.

Paddy O…

[Author]

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