suggestions and a bug

[kraftf]

Hello guys.

great product

bought it for both ipad and iphone.

The bug:

I am using Greek in a lot of my forms. When i try the search function i have to type a word that matches the word exactly. I f a letter is either upper or lower case and i insert the other way around then nothing will be found. If the language is English it doesn’t matter if i type upper or lower case and the search function is successful.

Small suggestion: Search function needs a second tap to enter the search box. I would prefer the cursor to get inside the box directly.

Another thing is to be able to see the link form records and also export them as well thru the export function and omit them.

Keep up the good work.

cheers

[Brendan]

Hello,

I just tested the tap-to-enter-search and the keyboard comes up with the first tap for me. You need to tap twice to get it to come up? Is there maybe just a delay before the keyboard appears? Try tapping just once and wait a second or two to see if the keyboard comes up.

The Greek searching in lowercase is something I’ll have to look into. I’m not 100% sure the search engine I’m using will support that properly. I’ll have to do some testing. Could you email me an example of some Greek words I can enter and then search for?

Thanks!

Brendan

[kraftf]

Well what i mean is when i press the search button i have to press again inside the search box in order to bring up the keyboard. It would be better to make it behave when you go on the springboard search on ipad you get the keyboard showing up automatically without retapping in the search box.

Try the greek name ΚΕΛΛΗΣ and search it by the term Κελλης or κελ or κΕΛ. You wont be able to find it. If you type the search terms ΚΕΛ, ΕΛΛ, ΛΗΣ then the record come up from the search.

Most important of the features that I would like to see is the ability to open files into all other installed apps that are able to open each specific filr format, like the ipad system does. It will make the file attachments so much more useful.

Thanks for the fast reply.

[lgol27]

How about wildcard in search? like a ‘%’ in SQL…..

And “Open with…” option for the file field could be very cool.

[Brendan]

Hello Igol27,

You can search for words that begin with a set of letters, but not full substring searches. For example, if you searched for “cre” you Tap Forms would return “credit cards”, but not “acre”.

I like the Open With… idea for the Files area and file attachments. I’ll look into that. You can already do that from other apps (including Mail) to launch Tap Forms.

Thanks,

Brendan

[lgol27]

That’s good to know.

My guess is you are using SQLite engine. Here is a quote from its documentation: “A percent symbol (“%”) in the LIKE pattern matches any sequence of zero or more characters in the string.”

http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html#booleanexpr

So using LIKE operator in string searches (this is what you have anyway) can make more powerful. Something like LIKE ‘%<search_string>%>’. I understand that your query is pretty complex, but a lot of people are asking for more powerful search and this could be a first step. You can add a couple of improvements to the search string, so it would change the UI, so more advanced users could use them and simple searches would be done as they are now.

BTW what kind of files can you open in TapForms form the mail?

[lgol27]

BTW the information about that the search is actually ‘starts with’ search is missing from the manual. And ‘open with …’ from the mail is too.

[Brendan]

Hello Igol27,

The problem with using the LIKE command in SQLite is the poor performance, especially when you use a substring search. For that reason I am using the FTS3 full-text search engine. The data in the search engine is stored and managed in a separate table to facilitate very fast searches. But it does present some problems of its own, such as not being able to do substring searches, but only prefix match searches.

Sorry about the manual not being updated. I had that created for me before I added the Open with… functionality. I’ve also just added support for that from within Tap Forms. So now when you view the contents of a file on the Files tab or from a File Attachment field, you’ll get a screen which has an action menu button that will let you open that file within another app that supports the file type being viewed. As an added bonus, there’s also a Print function for file attachments.

Thanks,

Brendan

[lgol27]

I see your reservations. What do you say about a suggestion to limit the search to a specific form, or a specific form and field. This way you can narrow down with a fast search your candidates and the second slow search would run on a small number of records? This way you can have an advanced search and the performance would be so cripple….

[lgol27]

I know that FTS3 supports logical operations : AND, OR, NOT. So you can build a good advanced search system. And if you combine it with a facility to save the searches, it can leverage the application to the new level. The more people use the application, the more information they enter, the more they need more refined searches. And when they start using the advanced queries they would need a place to store/retrieve saved searches. I would suggest a page similar to the forms page. So the saved searches could be divided to categories (could be different from the forms).

And there should be a configuration parameter where you can choose what page(forms,searches, or to stay on previously open page) to show on the startup of the application. Another option could be to open the app with results of the selected search.

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