Is it possible to export entire app ?

1 comment

What would be the purpose behind the export?

• Blake Harrison - DataBlender
• 25 days ago

Answer

Surprisingly in the early days of QuickBase there was a command to do this:

?act=doexport&filetype=oif

I think oif stood for "OneBase Interchange Format" where OneBase was the predecessor product name for what became QuickBase. If you try that command today the response is "OIF format is no longer supported."

That said there is a relatively easy way to get an external structural representation of forms and form rules. However, I am not going to reveal it without understanding what your purpose is. There is a good chance your proposed usage may violate QuickBase's terms of service.

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Answered by:

dandiebolt_QB_Pirate , Pres. of Service Worker Union
QuickBase Pro 24 days ago



1 comment

ok..i understand

• Shihad
• 22 days ago

Export to where?

I have a similar situation as Leslie G, a client closing their business.  They have stated the possibilty of opening another business in the coming months, and may want to use the same set of apps.  So Dan G, how about sharing the "relatively easy way to get an external structural representation of forms and form rules."  For that matter, is there a way to get all schema elements (other than API_GetSchema) that allows for easy creation of the app in a new Quick Base account?

The biggest issue is preserving cross-app relationships, which there are many.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to export an entire App. CSV files per table is the long way. The API GetSchema is the way I know to pull the App setup. The last option is using QB desktop to pull the full App data into MS Access. This will only work to pull the data into MS Access, it won't import back into Quick Base as a new App, but it will at least have the entire app setup in Access: (see steps)

http://www.quickbase.com/developer/knowledge-base/how-would-i-automatically-download-quickbase-table...

Sounds like a feature that should be voiced to Quickbase. For example, what would happen if you just stopped paying your bill? All information disappears? Yikes that would suck if you were a one man business and went into a coma for a few months. There goes all your information. Ouch.

We do retain the App data on the servers for a 6 month period after the deletion or cancellation of an account, before we fully purge all app data. So hopefully they wake up before the six months are up
; ) 

The "state" of a QuickBase application is scatter all over the place so you would have to do a lot of nuisance work to locate on which pages you could extract the state and more work to restore it. The primary "state" you probably want to save is the forms, followed by reports and the dashboard.

One way to save the state of forms is to use script and the FormData API.

This code will extract all properties of a form to an object which can be further searalized and save externally.

var formData = new FormData(mainform);
for(var pair of formData.entries()) {
   console.log(pair[0]+ ', '+ pair[1]); 
}

The essence of this technique is to capture all the form properties while it is being edited and to save them externally