New Features

1. Added reminders for tasks. These reminders are specified as a type of “notification”. You can set the time after a task has been accepted for a reminder email or SMS to be sent to the user who accepted it, or to someone else. So for example you could have a reminder after 2 days for the assigned user to “Get on with it!”. You could also set another reminder that if the task is not completed within 5 days a reminder is sent to a supervisor that includes a link to the task so that the supervisor can complete it. You can specify the reminder interval in hours or minutes as well as days, I’d like to think that “minutes” is there mainly so I can demonstrate the feature, however it may prove useful in fast moving problem domains.
2. Allow URLs of images to be set as dynamic defaults for image questions. For example you could use cascading selects to select a schematic from thousands of available images. This schematic can then be annotated by the user and submitted with the completed form. This feature is now available in Webforms and in fieldTask 6.21. Here is an example form that gets the images from Wikipedia. Commonly however you will want to retrieve the images from the same Smap server that you are using to complete the form. By getting the images from the same server you won’t be blocked by CORS. Wikipedia does not enforce CORS but sites that require authentication, such as other Smap servers, would.
3. Added dynamic defaults to webforms. A dynamic default is specified in the “calculation” attribute of a question. Hence you can set the initial answer to a question based on the answer to a preceding question. Allowing images to be used as dynamic default values as described above is a special case of this new feature. This feature is already available in fieldTask.
4. Customise the appearance of the web site for an organisation by setting the colour of the menu bars and by specifying the main picture on the home page. You can specify these themes in the Organisations tab of the user management page.
5. Add support for “track changes”. This is a feature from the ODK community that audits every change to a question answer while a form is being completed. So it adds to the existing audit capability that allows you to record the total time spent in each question and the GPS coordinates when it was finally answered. You can enable “track changes” in the settings dialog of the online editor. However you will need the soon to be released fieldTask 6.21 in order to use it.