V5.3 Manual

[Ron]

How do I access the new manual.

“New Tap Forms 5.3 manual, including a section on the JavaScript API you can use to write scripts to read and manipulate your records.”

Ron

[Ron]

Never mind I found it under the help menu.

Ron

[Brendan]

Excellent. I’m glad you found it. At the top of the online user manual page you can actually switch between the different manual versions.

[MUSTAFA AFYONLUOĞLU]

Hi !
Could you please show the location of the manual for IPhone and IPad TapForm Users?
Thank you. :)

[Brendan]

Hi Mustafa,

There’s no manual for the iOS version, but the Mac manual has many of the same concepts. Plus there are screencast videos for both macOS and iOS versions.

iOS screencasts:
https://vimeo.com/channels/tapformsios

Mac manual:
https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5.3/en/topic/overview

Mac screencasts:
https://vimeo.com/channels/tapformsmac5/page:1

Thanks,

Brendan

[MUSTAFA AFYONLUOĞLU]

Dear Brendan
Thank you very much for your quick, kind and helpfull answer. You’re great for customer satisfaction as well as the powerfull product TapForms !

Best wishes from Turkey :)

[Peter Chamalian]

As a new user, the manual is too granular. I need something to better understand the architecture of Tapforms and the nomenclature used. I am a retired Lotus Notes developer so I fully understand forms, fields, etc. In notes we use a view to display data which is seen through a form to be a document.

I’m hoping to better understand how Tapforms is organized so I can better develop in it.

[Brendan]

Hi Peter,

In Tap Forms, a Document is the container for the SQLite database along with its photos and file attachments. A .tapforms document is really just a folder that contains all those things. The operating system treats it as a single file even though it’s a folder.

Within documents are forms. Forms can be categorized into categories. Forms also consist of the fields. The forms also are the containers for the records. The records contain the values for all the fields defined within the form. Documents can also have a set of Pick Lists defined which can be assigned to fields within the form. The Pick Lists define a static set of frequently used values that you can easily select from. Forms can also have layouts. Layouts have layout items to define where on the screen or page an object should appear.

There’s not much more to it than that. Hopefully that gives you a better idea of how Tap Forms is organized.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Dave Emme]

Brendon said:
There’s no manual for the iOS version, but the Mac manual has many of the same concepts.

Well, “concepts” yes, but that’s not sufficient. I’m currently trying to work with scripts on iOS, and the Mac manual refers to objects such as menus which don’t seem to exist as such in the iOS version. For example, I still can’t figure out Form scripts vs script fields in records.

And in any case, the gears and levers of scripts are still opaque to me. For example, the scripts chapter in the Mac manual gives an example of a Movie DB script which runs automatically when barcode information is entered into a record’s field. But from the example given, I can’t see how/why that should happen. There seems to be nothing overt in the script which indicates that action. Apparently there is some invisible TapForms code which “magically does the right thing” in some unspecified set of circumstances. I believe that in one of your Forum posts, you said something to the effect of “when Tap see this in your script, it does <something>”, which is not in the basic description of the operation of “this”. Where is all of this sort of thing documented?

FYI: I’m a retired programmer who completely understands that it’s more fun to write code than to write documentation. But I think that for an app as powerful and useful as Tap Forms, a little more work in the latter might be helpful.

[Brendan]

Hi Dave,

The Script Editor on the iOS version was built tased upon the Calculation field’s formula editor. If you’re familiar with writing formulas in Tap Forms then hopefully that’ll translate over to using the Script Editor.

When you tap on the script to edit it, a toolbar appears above the keyboard. Tapping on the fx button is how you access the Snippets, which are the little bits of code that Tap Forms writes for you to do different things. The field button just to the right of the fx button is where you access the list of fields. Tapping on a field will insert the appropriate code into the script. You can have Tap Forms generate the record.getFieldValue() function for you or just generate the var field_name = 'fld-1234....'; code for you.

I’ve also updated the manual to describe a bit about the “magic” that triggers a Script field to execute. Basically any reference to record.getFieldValue(field_id) in the script will tell Tap Forms to start monitoring the referenced field for changes. If you edit the field value in a record, Tap Forms will look to see if any scripts are referencing that field. If so, it will then execute the script within that Script field.

Form level scripts are executed manually by you. You do that from the action menu button on the records list view by tapping on Run Script and choosing the script to run. You can also edit scripts from there too.

Hope that helps you a bit more.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Dave Emme]

OK, great! That helped a lot; thanks.

Now I have one more question (or feature request?):

I have a database of phone calls, with a parent form “Callers” and a child form “Calls”, linked via the phone number. Callers has a join to Calls, to display a nice table of related calls in the Callers record.

What I’m trying to do is extract the number of call records and the date of the last call from the related Calls form records and place those values in fields in the related Callers form record.

I have a script field in Callers with a script which extracts the wanted values and inserts them in the Caller record. The script works fine. Per your info above, I can automatically trigger the script by referring it to a changed field in the Callers record, but apparently only a “real” data field in Callers. What I would like is to have the script run automatically when I add a Call record, by clicking on the “+” in the Calls table joined to the Callers record. But if I try to make my script trigger on changes to that join field, nothing happens, even though it has effectively changed. So I have to manually trigger this script by making a change to a “real” field in the Callers record after adding the new Calls record.

Is there something equivalent to an “event” which will run my script when I add a record to the related Calls form/table? (Maybe this is something I should know, but I’m not (yet) a JavaScript programmer)

Thanks for your help!

[Brendan]

Modifying a child record should trigger a parent record’s Script field to run. But ya, it seems that just adding a record does not seem to trigger the parent record’s scripts to run. Deleting a child record and modifying a child record does though. I’ve just worked on a fix for that.

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