New Features

Adding notes to a survey

You can now record notes while you are completing a survey on fieldTask.  Notes can also be added after a survey has been saved as complete and before it it submitted to the server. You will need version 3.13 of FieldTask for this feature.

Notes

• To add a note start the survey or task then select “menu” | “add comment”. Press the button “Save Changes” to save the comment or press the back button to discard it.
• The name of the question currently being answered is automatically added to the note
• When adding notes to a completed survey most of the questions will be marked as readonly and cannot be modified.  However, currently, some question types will still appear capable of modification. Despite this appearance, the changes to questions will not be saved, only the changes to the notes
• Also when adding notes to a completed survey make sure you save the survey as well as each individual note or the notes will not be updated

Important.  Only surveys added after version 16.03 of the server will have the notes saved.  If you need this feature applied retrospectively to existing surveys let us know and we can make a quick database change that will allow that.

The following video illustrates the functionality

Security Considerations

Some people may consider it a security issue that the answers to completed surveys can now be reviewed on the phone.  If this is an issue to anyone let us know and we will rush out a patch allowing the feature to be disabled on the server.  It would also be possible to add a password to the form on the server that needs to be entered to review the completed survey.

Security Controls that can be enabled on the phone now are:

• A PIN to prevent access to unauthorised users
• Encryption of the sd card using Android native tools
• Remote wipes of the sd card using third party Android management apps
• Ensure “auto-delete” of survey results after submission to the server is enabled

The above controls are more critical for ensuring security than preventing some people, who already are authorised to access the phone, from seeing the completed data.  However as stated if you have a requirement for this we will add it.