Announcement of Smap Release – April 2013

Dashboard panels are now only viewable by the user that created them.  No more sharing!  The concept of sharing all dashboard panels worked reasonably well when a project team was working collaboratively on a project.  But there were still issues, for example when a team member wanted to do some experimentation with graphs.  However there were significant problems during workshops when 30 odd people were creating and deleting panels independently and the system was trying to keep all of the panels in sync.   So I came to the conclusion that no-sharing is better than sharing everything.   If anyone has any ideas on how to introduce some managed sharing back in to the dashboard panels let me know.

You can now specify address fields from the previous survey in follow up tasks.  See picture below:

tasks

fieldTask works a little differently.  The menu option “get new forms” now goes direct to the server.  If you want to delete forms or data from the phone you will need to select “delete forms” from the main menu.  

Other changes:

  • More informative error messages when uploading templates
  • Surveys can be set in settings to automatically upload when they have been completed (with odk1.3)
  • In settings you can specify the use of forward and next buttons instead of swiping (with odk1.3)
  • Vertices of polygon questions are now shown on map panels.  Apart from allowing the user to look at question responses on each point of the polygon the display of these points make it easier to find small polygons on the map.  (This one for Mark)
  • The usual assortment of bug fixes

2 thoughts on “Announcement of Smap Release – April 2013

  1. Evangelos

    Good morning,

    a quick question. Is it possible to have an “auto-update” option on the FieldTask app so that, when a task is created, the user doesn’t have to click on “refresh”?

    Is it already implemented?

    Thank you

    Reply
    1. Neil Penman Post author

      Hi, Sorry for the delay. You may want to contact me directly on neilpenman@gmail.com for future questions like this.

      This is a very good question. No its not implemented at the moment. In the settings you can request that completed surveys are automatically submitted however it does not refresh the task list. The reason for this is that the task list shows a user what they have completed (green tick) and what they have submitted (upward pointing arrow). When the list is refreshed the submitted tasks are removed from the list since they are done. So the reason I didn’t add the automatic refresh is that I wanted the user to be able to note the surveys submitted before clearing them.

      However automatic refresh of tasks would also be good.

      Some options could be:
      1) If the user sets the auto submit option then auto refresh should also be enabled
      2) There could be another option in settings to enable auto-refresh of tasks independently of auto submit of results
      3) There could be another feature such as “show history” that could list all the downloads, completions, submissions etc. Then the task list screen need only ever show the current state. This would be a lot better than the current solution.

      what are your thoughts?

      regards

      Neil

      Reply

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