Automatic Phone Refresh
When there is a change to a survey, or the data that a survey references, then these changes can be pushed automatically down to all the affected phones.
Changes automatically refreshed include:
- New survey added to a project (See video)
- Survey Edited (See video)
- Survey deleted
- Survey Blocked
- Update to a dependent survey. For example if a survey gets reference data from the results of another survey then updates to those results will result in the phone being refreshed (See video)
- Change in phone users settings, ie added to a new project or new security settings
- Tasks: added, deleted, assigned, unassigned, properties changed
- Project set up changed. For example setting to “Task only” (In version 17.09 +)
You can specify automatic refresh in the organisation settings or in the phone settings for Wifi, Cellular or both. The organisation settings, if set on, will override the settings on the phone. Note these settings have been used for a while but previously would only automatically submit finished results to the server. Now they also automatically download new versions of the form.
Timing Data
The latest version of odkCollect and FieldTask 5 can collect the time taken to complete each questions. You can now enable forms for this timing data and then view this data through the API.
- To enable the collection of timing data open the survey in the online editor. Then select File | Settings from the menu. There will be a checkbox “timing data” that you can click to enable the collection of times.
- To view the data add “audit=yes” to a request for data from the API. For example the following 2 API calls download data, including question response times, for a survey. The second URL is for the sub form.
Other New Features
- “Acknowledge” question type added to the online editor. This creates a question with a single checkbox.
- Updated the Kobo API to return data from sub forms as well as the main form. Using this link https://sg.smap.com.au/api/v1/data (user: gplay, password: gplay) returns a list of the available forms. For the form titled “Sub Forms” you will see there is an extra URL returned that allows you to select the sub form of data. To support sub forms additional parameters have been added such as “start_parkey”. For details refer to the documentation.
- Upgraded FieldTask to include odkCollect 1.8.1. This is considered a major release so it has been given the version number 5.0. The reason being that this update no longer supports versions of Android up to 4.04. Hence FT4 will be kept available for older versions. FT5 will be in google play shortly and will then be progressively rolled out onto servers.