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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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