Tap Forms Mac needs to have sync enabled every time

[Brent McInnis]

Hi,

Every time Tap Forms Mac (version 3.5.3, build 665) is started, it comes up with cloud sync disabled. I have my syncing set to work through Dropbox, and I’m having to remember to “enable sync” manually on the Mac every time I start up Tap Forms there. Once I do so, it immediately sees all my iOS devices, and syncing works fine, although the first sync takes a few minutes to start and to complete.

That’s it – it’s easy to work around if you know what’s going on, but it is a nuisance, and it will probably trip up a lot of users and make them think their syncing is broken if they don’t realize it’s happening.

[Lucas D]

I am a brand new user, also using version 3.5.3, build 665 (App Store version), and I am finding that sync doesn’t work at all. I have emailed support and am awaiting a response, but in the meantime I thought I would chime in here, because it sounds like it may be a related issue. After I select a Sync Service, and then try to sync, I get a message saying, “Please select a Sync Service from the Sync Panel…” And then when I go back to the sync settings panel, I find that sync is once again disabled. So somehow it seems that sync settings aren’t sticking. Sometimes I think it happened that when I went back to sync settings it showed that sync was once again disabled, although that isn’t happening now. I’ve tried everything I can think of, with both iCloud and Dropbox, and still I get the same message every time, “Please select…”

[Lucas D]

Please disregard my previous post (I can no longer edit it). Support got back to me and my problem was fixed by a simple reboot. (Or a moderator could just remove these posts of mine.)

[Brendan]

Hi Lucas,

I’m glad that you got it working again by rebooting.

Brent, I was going to suggest the reboot too.

Thanks,

Brendan

P.S. I am the moderator of the forums, the developer, the designer, the support person, the website admin, everything. So anytime you communicate with support@tapforms.com or post here, you get me :-)

[Brent McInnis]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for the suggestion, but no, rebooting doesn’t help the problem I’m seeing.

Brent

[Brendan]

Brent,

Can you please type in the following command before and after you set the sync service?

defaults read com.tapforms.mac cloud-service

And this one too:

defaults read com.tapforms.mac icloud-enabled

That’s where Tap Forms stores the preference that you’ve set when you select the cloud service or enable sync. The “icloud-enabled” should probably have been renamed to “sync-enabled”, but I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to mess with everyone’s setting, so I left it at “icloud-enabled”. but all it does is tell Tap Forms if the Enable Sync checkbox has been turned on or off.

Also, if you ever select the sync service, a Reset Sync happens in the background. So what you want to do is select the sync service on each device first before enabling sync on each device. Otherwise sync will be turned off on each device when you select a sync service on that or any other device.

By the way, if you ever use the Restore command, it will disable sync.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brent McInnis]

Brendan,

I don’t fully understand.

When you refer to me “setting the sync service”, I guess you mean making a selection in preferences between “None”, “iCloud” and “Dropbox”?

I don’t normally perform that operation. I did it once, a month or so ago, to switch from iCloud to Dropbox, but haven’t done it since. Ever since, my sync service has stayed set at Dropbox, so I haven’t touched it. Are you asking me to do it now (switch from Dropbox to one of the other two, then back to Dropbox) for debugging purposes? And if so, just on the Mac, or on my 3 iOS devices as well?

Just to clarify, my iOS devices all behave as expected – that is, when Tap Forms starts up on them, I find that my sync service is set to Dropbox, sync is enabled, and my Mac plus my 3 iOS devices are showing as registered on all 3 devices. When Tap Form starts on my Mac, however, it has its sync service set to Dropbox, but sync is DISABLED. All I’ve been doing is checking the “enable sync” box on the Mac, and it has immediately listed itself and the 3 iOS devices as registered, and sync has worked (until I quit Tap Forms).

So, back to my original question – what exactly do you want me to do, and on which devices?

[Brendan]

Hi Brent,

Sorry, I thought maybe the sync service selection wasn’t being saved either.

Please just type in the following command into the Terminal application window:

defaults read com.tapforms.mac icloud-enabled

It should say 0 if it’s off or 1 if it’s on.

And if it says 0, type in this command:

defaults write com.tapforms.mac icloud-enabled 1

That’s the setting that Tap Forms is changing when you enable sync. I’m not sure why Tap Forms is not able to set it for you on your computer though.

Just see if that works.

Launch Tap Forms after you enter in that command to see if sync is still enabled.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brent McInnis]

Hi Brendan,

What I’ve found is that, initially after bringing up Tap Forms, the “defaults read” command returns 0.

The “defaults write” command does seem to work, in that after doing it, subsequent “defaults read” commands return 1.

After quitting Tap Forms, the “defaults read” command continues to return 1.

But once I try to start up Tap Forms again, the “defaults read” command returns 0. It does this even before I enter my encryption key, and continues to do it after I enter my encryption key.

Once I’m into Tap Forms, if I click the “enable sync” box, the “defaults read” command starts returning 1, as it should.

So, in sum, there seems to be something resetting the iCloud-enabled flag when I start up Tap Forms.

Thanks for investigating this,

Brent

[Brendan]

Hi Brent,

Can you do an experiment and turn off encryption in your database to see if that’s the issue?

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brent McInnis]

Hi Brendan,

OK, I turned off encryption, and then enabled sync, and then quit Tap Forms. When I started Tap Forms back up, I found that sync was disabled, the same as I’ve been seeing.

Brent

[Brendan]

Hi Brent,

Oh that’s just very strange.

Do you have the same TFSyncDevice files in the Dropbox/Tap Forms Sync/SyncDocuments folder as you do in the ~/Library/Containers/com.tapforms.mac/Data/Application Support/SyncDocuments folder?

I wonder if there’s a missing file there and that’s why it’s getting turned off when you restart?

[rockies]

I am encountering the same issue each time I start TapForms on my iMac.

When I type the command in Terminal to see of I have the same TFSyncDevice files, it states, “No such file or directory.”

I also see “1” when I type the command: defaults read com.tapforms.mac icloud-enabled

[Brendan]

Rockies,

1 means that you do have the Enable Sync switch turned on.

I’m surprised about the No such file or directory error though.

Are you sure you’re going to the right place? It’s easy to get the path wrong, such as leaving out the ~ in the file path.

[Anthony Compton]

Brendan,

For what it’s worth I am seeing the same issue on both OS X and iOS. I don’t think I have reenable 100% of the time but it’s high 90% for sure. I am using iCloud sync. this happened with the last minor upgrade for me.

Anthony

[Wolfgang Lenzenhofer]

Hi,

I’ve got the same problem on iOS: not every time, but much too often I have to reenable the iCloud sync on my iPhone and iPad (both on the latest iOS version and running the current TapForms). After that the syncing is running flawless.

This behaviour started a few weeks ago.

[Brendan]

I’m working on a new sync system that will hopefully alleviate this whole issue. But it’s a big project since it involves migrating everyone’s database over to a new database engine (Couchbase Mobile).

[Brent McInnis]

Brendan,

That’s great news. I will be looking forward to using the new technique. Thanks for investing your time into this project.

Brent

[Brendan]

I’m just working on the data migration code at the moment. Once I get that done, then I can see if I can get Tap Forms to read the data from the database and display it on screen. Converting all the Saved Searches to a new search mechanism is going to be a super hard challenge because Couchbase does searching totally different than SQLite. But the great thing about Couchbase Mobile is that the sync is just built-in, either via a cloud service or via peer-to-peer WiFi. I haven’t decided about the cloud service to use yet though. There are many options. But it won’t be Dropbox or iCloud. It’ll either be something like http://www.cloudant.com or me setting up a Couchbase Server service on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services or something like that. And that’ll cost me money to run, so cloud sync may become a subscription service. Peer-to-peer WiFi sync would be free.

If you think about what iCloud Drive and Dropbox are, they are just file servers in the cloud. They simply store the files that Tap Forms writes. All syncing is done via the client. But with Couchbase, there must be an actual database server and sync gateway in the cloud that manages the syncing process from all the devices. But that’s the great thing about it, since the database in the cloud becomes the “source of truth”. It will also mean less storage space is consumed by Tap Forms on your devices.

It’s still in the development and proof of concept stages. I’ve got the code mostly written to migrate the database. Still a bit more work to do on that plus migrate all the saved searches. That’s the biggest challenge really.

But the fun never ends developing Tap Forms! :)

Thanks,

Brendan

[Anthony Compton]

Brendan,

I appreciate the work you have put into TapForms and I use it daily. That said I would hope you will retain an option to use a Cloud based sync service that does not require a monthly fee. My personal preference would be to be able to sync using something that I own. Such as a Transporter or Bittorrent Sync. In any event, I need to be able to sync across computers that may not always be on the same network.

How an option to host my own sync server?

[rockies]

Brendan,

I appreciate your efforts to respond to user requests and to update TapForms as technology changes. As someone who knows nothing about the behind the scenes computer code, I am unable to understand why one sync service is better than the other. Not knowing how Apple does it, I still have a lot of confidence in Apple to maintain their cloud services.

I realize I posted previously about sync services not being enabled when I launch TapForms, but it is easy enough for me to enable it. I would rather accept this work around than TapForms to move away from iCloud.

I imagine there are many opinions regarding how best to sync TapForms via a cloud service or via Wi-Fi.

My opinion is to keep iCloud and DropBox while adding the other sync options requested by others. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that may not be possible and a choice will have to be made regarding which opinions are heard the most.

Thank you for your efforts to create a productive application and I’m sorry this type of challenge makes it difficult to satisfy everyone’s requests.

[Brendan]

It would be great to be able to keep iCloud Drive and Dropbox as options, and who knows, maybe I can swing that, but iCloud Drive and Dropbox are fundamentally just folders on the Internet that contain files. They know nothing about the logic behind syncing. With Couchbase, there is a syncing protocol built-in to it which requires both end points to understand that protocol. It’s like two people needing to know the same language in order to communicate effectively.

99% of my email support requests are about people not being able to get Dropbox or iCloud communicating properly. Once it’s all working it’s generally fine, but there are also some things you have to be careful of when managing your syncing. That’s what I’m hoping to solve with the move to Couchbase. Since it’s a database engine that has built-in sync, it should effectively be a turn it on and forget it affair. I’ve done some experimenting with their sample apps and it’s great to be able to check a box on one device and see that box checked a few seconds later on the other device without me having to do anything more than that.

That’s my goal for Tap Forms.

I realize nobody wants to have to pay for anything more than the base cost of the app once and never again after that, but if a cloud based service ends up costing me money to operate, then I will have no choice but to pass that on to the customer. Imagine me having to pay more to keep the service running than what I earn from only new sales? I’d quickly go out of business and Tap Forms would cease to exist. I don’t want that and I know you don’t want that.

I may eventually be able to allow you to connect to your own instance of the Couchbase sync gateway that’s connected to your own Couchbase server. This would be great for small businesses that want to sync the devices to their own server. A paid subscription would only be required if someone either didn’t want to sync via WiFi and couldn’t run their own sync gateway/server.

Syncing via WiFi is great also because I know a bunch of customers use Tap Forms in the field (for example on archeological digs) and being able to sync over an ad-hoc WiFi network would be great for them. They don’t always have access to the Internet wherever they are. Couchbase is even flexible enough to allow some devices to sync via WiFi and some via WiFi and the cloud. So those devices syncing only on WiFi will eventually get the data in the cloud too when the device that’s syncing with both are updated. Now that’ll take a lot of time and testing to see if I can get that to work and probably wouldn’t be a feature right out of the gate. It’ll all take time.

And here’s another issue I’ve been faced with. The moment I released the update to support Dropbox sync, I got a notice from Dropbox that said they’re discontinuing support for the Dropbox Sync API. Of all the things… I worked for months to add Dropbox sync, only to discover that they no longer support it the moment I release it to production. It won’t cease to function they said, but they won’t be bringing out any further updates to it anymore. So I’m kind of forced to move on from that.

So that’s that for now :-)

Thanks,

Brendan

[Anthony Compton]

My fix for having to re-enable sync frequently:

After the last upgrade I noticed that TapFroms routinely lost the Sync Enable setting. Two days ago I got tired of checking all my devices and enabling sync as needed so I started looking for a fix. So far the steps below seem to have fixed my issue. I started with iCloud sync enabled and finished with Dropbox as my sync site. This might have worked just as well if I kept iCloud I don’t know.

Step 1 – Pick a compute with a complete copy of your TapForms data and disable sync. If your prompted to keep a local copy or a cloud copy choose local.

Step 2 – Set the sync service to None. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for all your devices.

Step 3 – Go back to the main computer and set sync service to DropBox, enable sync and let the sync complete.

Step 4 – Repeat step 3 for all your other deices.

I have not had a sync issue since completing this and my sync has stayed enabled on all my devices. Hopefully sharing this info does not jinx me. Good luck

AC

[Rob Tn]

Since I struggled with the similar sync problems I post my ‘solution’: I found out that on my Macbook (10.10.3) there is a difference between two folders that are being used by dropbox and tap forms. One folder is hidden in the Library (Bibliotheek), one is the regular DropBox folder. They seem not to be in sync on the local harddisk and therefore also not in sync online. So it might be that TapForms is using the wrong directory (and also missing the sync files of the other devices!) or DropBox is missing out the hidden folder. When manually (or with a script) merging these two folders everything is working fine.

Hope this helps

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[sunshine]

Hi Brendan,

Assuming that users will be happy and willing to move their data from iCloud to another platform is a bold and untested assumption, perhaps driven by the unfortunate turn of events you have experienced with Dropbox. By all means provide enhanced synchronisation options for those who want/require it, but dropping support for iCloud would be rash and infuriating for many existing users.

Best Regards

[Author]

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