Storage Totes/Containers Inventory Tracking

[Kurtois]

Has anyone created a project / database in TapForms to track items stored within boxes?

Some thoughts:
– Associate multiple photos and text for an item that is placed in a box
– Create a barcode that can be affixed to a box for later scanning to retrieve inventory of the box
– Text search for an item to get box data and location

Let me know if I may add additional detail or clarify the above.

[Sam Moffatt]

I’ve got something like that, it’s pretty straight forward use of a Tap Forms form. The built in photos field supports multiple photos, you can create a title field and potentially a notes field for long form text.

With Tap Forms for Mac, there is a label printing mode that lets you print barcodes. I personally prefer to just buy pre-printed barcodes and put them on items but Tap Forms can generate barcodes for you as well.

The built in search will do a FTS index on the document and I generally haven’t had major issues retrieving content. The only quirk worth mentioning is to wrap items with a minus sign in quotes, the negative sign is used as a negation operator but quoting the string disables that behaviour.

There are a few barcode threads on the forum that might help:

• there was person with a cassette tape use case that has some details.
• here is one on home inventory and batch processing for assigning items to boxes.
• another one on inventory barcode scanning which also references what I’ve done with ScanKey in the past as well.
• there was also an inventory with serial tracking post as well might be useful.
• and one last one also refers to a video where I show using Siri Shortcuts to automate creating records in Tap Forms from barcodes (generally shipping labels.

[Kurtois]

Sam Moffatt,

Thank you very much for the reply. Some questions:

1.
FTS = Full Table Scan?

2.
“The only quirk worth mentioning is to wrap items with a minus sign in quotes”

Are you referring to when I perform the search to wrap the minus? Perhaps an example would be helpful for me, please.

3.
I am just curious why you prefer to purchase pre-printed barcodes. Easier? Cheaper?

[Sam Moffatt]

1. FTS is full text search in this context. Though I can see that being confusing, the acronym is overloaded in the database world (I think I’ve used it here when referring to code that traverses all records in a form).

2. Yeah so if you have an item with the key ‘T-509’, if you do a search for that without quoting it the FTS engine interprets it as “T” not including 509 when really you wanted ‘T-509’. You just need to quote it to avoid it interpreting the search term as a negation operator.

3. I don’t have a label printer or similar gear and I don’t have a use case that generally pre-generates keys so I just buy them as I need them and apply them as necessary. I personally loathe printing because its something that should be simpler than it invariably is so I take the trade off to get everything right versus just paying to have labels show up when I need them.

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