Tag Archives: release

Release 18.6

Email Tasks

The ability to send pre filled or blank forms as links in  emails out to people for completion in their browser.  Capabilities include:

  1. Forms can only be filled in once by each recipient (unless the repeat flag is set)
  2. The URL to access the form includes a key so that the user does not need to have an account on the server
  3. You can upload email address and form names from a file and then have the emails sent to all of those addresses
  4. There is an unsubscribe link in all emails
  5. People can resubscribe, if they change their mind by going to the subscriptions page (on the home page select subscriptions)
  6. Emails with a pre-filled in form can be sent automatically when a submission is received for any other form

Really what this does is enable you to extend you data collection beyond the professional data collectors who have a logon on the server.  Hence you can do email surveys, as per Survey Monkey and also integrate input from external people in a multi step process.  So in fact Smap goes way beyond the capabilities in Survey Monkey.

Note: Email tasks are disabled on the sg server by default. Contact us if you want to use this feature.

Auto sending email tasks

You can also assign tasks that include previously collected data to an email address .   As with other tasks, that are completed by logged in users,  you can create these from previously submitted results or results as they come in.  Here is a video of an example process but there are an infinite number of ways you can use this feature:

After completing the steps shown in the above video and then doing an XLS report I got the following output:

Loading Email Addresses from an Excel File 

Email tasks are managed from the tasks module,  From there you can create a task group and then click on the file menu to download an XLS file.  In this case for new task group it will be empty but you can specify the “tasks” here.

The columns with blue headings are where you put details about the form.  (See above). The columns with yellow heading contain details about the person being sent the email including of course their email address.  You can add multiple email addresses to be sent a single form hence the greyed out cells in the above example where we have one form but two email addresses.  Also you don’t need to fill in the URL column, this is only filled in when exporting in case you want to manually send the links out without using Smap’s email manager.

Once you have filled in your forms and email addresses.  Click on the Menu File > Load XLS.  Emails will not immediately be sent, you will then have the opportunity to review the loading emails and when you are ready you can select the menu “Email Unsent”.   This will send the emails with blank forms.

Unsubscribe From emails

This became urgently needed due to the addition of the “Email Tasks” functionality, however the unsubscribe link is now added to any email sent from the Smap server including for example an email adding you as a registered user.  If someone clicks on that link they are asked if they want to confirm the un-subscription.  If they say yes then they won’t be sent any more emails.   They only way to resume sending emails to an unsubscribed address is if you can persuade them to:

  • Goto to the server home page
  • Click on the subscriptions menu
  • And subscribe again

Updates to FieldTask version 5.5

Well this was released some time ago but I didn’t make an announcement on this news site so here it is.  Lots of new features here contributed by the folk from ODK as well as the fieldTask developers. Some of the main ones are:

  • Online lookup of data from a server while the user is completing the form. You can lookup reference data, choices for a select or query an AI web service.
  • Non printable characters in barcodes will now show as spaces rather than being removed completely
  • Includes ODKCollect 1.15
    – Can set a dark or light theme to change the screen appearance
    – Add a “file” type question that allows you to attach any file to the form

 

 

 

Release of Smap HTML / iPhone Evaluation Tools

Announcing Smap Evaluation Tools Server version 13.09.  New functionality includes:

  1. Support for completing surveys on a web browser. Browsers need to support HTML5 and can be on a laptop, iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile .
  2. Automatic dropping of duplicate surveys.  Previously the duplicate would have been marked as “bad” so that it did not appear in exported results or graphs however these duplicates could still be seen in table views.
  3. Calculate questions are now shown in the exported spreadsheet in their correct position relative to other questions in the survey.  So if you add a question to calculate the age in months after a date of birth question, then age in months will appear after DOB in the exported results.
  4. If you explicitly specify a “start time”, “end time” or IMEI question in your survey then these are no longer automatically added by Smap as well

WebForm Evaluation Tool

webform

Screen shot of web form in Chrome browser on a  Mac laptop

Features

  • Uses the open source Enketo forms engine
  • (Should) work in any HTML5 capable browser
  • GPS coordinates
  • Multi- choice and single select questions
  • Integer and text questions
  • Uploading of photographs (on some browsers, those with better HTML5 support)
  • Repeating groups
  • Relevance
  • Works offline and saves results for submission later when there is a network connection

Issues

The web forms feature is really a beta release so you can expect to find some issues.  Report any you find and we will try to get them fixed in the next release.  Known issues include:

  1. Some odk 1.4 functions that depend on javarosa do not work.  For example the new date time functions.
  2. Surveys that have images in their questions or options will not work with webForms
  3. Large surveys may be slow particularly when downloading or expanding a conditional group
  4. Safari on iPhone has some additional restrictions:
  • File uploads are not supported on Safari / iPhone
  • Expansion of conditional groups that are made relevant based on responses to prior questions do not work

Phone Browsers

iphone

Situation Assessment using Safari on an iPhone

android

Situation Assessment using Chrome on Android

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Applications for the web forms feature

The ability to complete forms on web browsers adds a lot of flexibility to your data collection. For example it is now possible to send out an email or tweet with a link to a survey that the recipient can complete on their browser.

Installation

This is straightforward and very similar to previous installation.  Updated instructions are in the README file.  If you have an existing smap installation you should be able to just run the webformsInstall script to update the platform to support webForms (MySQL and PHP).  You can then deploy the updated application code as before.  Contact me if you have any issues.

If you are installing your own server you can get it from here.

Deployment onto Smap Managed Servers

I will progressively deploy this release onto the servers managed by Smap Consulting over the next few days.  However the ability to complete surveys using WebForms may not suit everyone.  Hence I will disable this functionality by default on each server unless you request that it be switched on.

Acknowledgements

Web Forms uses the excellent Enketo toolkit. This toolkit has been integrated into Smap by the following undergraduate students from RMIT who have done an excellent job.

  • HeeSien Ooi
  • Kar Ming Clement Kam
  • Kiman Sze
  • Mohamad Bahaa Maarouf
  • Shishir Chawla
  • Teck We Kee