Tag Archives: odkCollect

Testing a long survey

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When creating long surveys for fieldTask you may want to try out a newly created, or modified section, that is a long way from the start. Its time consuming having to swipe past a lot of early questions and even worse if these have been set as “required”.  To quickly get to the right section you can use the “Go To Prompt” feature. Figure 1.

Start the survey in fieldTask or, odkCollect, select “menu” then “Go To Prompt”. A list of questions will be displayed which you can scroll through to find the question you want.

If you have repeating groups in your survey then this list of questions will initially stop at the repeat group.  To go further press on the downward arrow at the left of the repeat group name. Figure 2.

 

end2

Figure 3

Then press on the name that will appear at the bottom of the screen. The questions in the repeating group will be shown and you can continue to scroll down to find the section that you want to test.

Exporting Surveys to Openstreetmap

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I have added a new option to the Smap Server that will export a survey in OSM format. The following video shows this being used to add house numbers to Openstreetmap.

The survey from that video is defined in an XLSForm template reproduced below:
osmsurvey

This survey will collect the street name, odd or even, country, city, postcode in the top level form. It then collects the house numbers and their locations in a repeating group.  Some of the top level fields are copied into each house record using the “calculate” type.

I have adopted a couple of naming conventions for surveys that are destined to be exported to osm.

  1. Any question name that starts with an underscore, such as _country, is not exported.
  2. If the question name starts with “addr_”, then that is changed to “addr:”. The reason for this is that XLSForm did not seem to support the use of colons inside names but they are used in OSM key values.

I completed the survey twice to get the house numbers for a street called Jewell Crescent. When the results are exported the OSM file looks like this:

[code language=”xml”]

























































[/code]

After loading into Openstreetmap it looks like this.

This new functionality is in the source code now. It will be included in the next production release of Smap on Sunday 28th of July, after which the server can be downloaded from here.
Other Thoughts

  1. Currently option names map to OSM values.  This is quite restrictive as ODK does not allow these names to have spaces.  I will probably add an option to the export function that, if set, will use the option label to set the OSM value.
  2. You can export any survey to Openstreetmap.  Most of the time these won’t have been designed to be loaded directly as the demo was.  However it can still be useful to get the data into JOSM and then manually copy information into new OSM nodes.  For example if you have a survey with information on health clinics.

Connected Arabic fonts in Android 2.3

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I’m working with a customer that is conducting a survey in Iraq using Samsung Galaxy Y Duos (android 2.3) and fieldTask. Later model phones (android 3+) worked well with Arabic but not these earlier versions. Even after rooting the phones and installing new fonts it still didn’t connect the characters.  See below a screen shot using Dr Ben Ox Arabic fonts which seemed to give the best results.
arabic2 (1)

Fortunately there is an Arabic reshaping library available from https://github.com/agawish/Better-Arabic-Reshaper/ which can be used with these old phones. I added ArabicReshaper.java and ArabicUtilities.java from this library to the odkCollect library that performs survey completion in fieldTask. I then modified the “QuestionWidget.java”, “SelectOneWidget.java” and “SelectMultipleWidget.java” files in odkCollect to call the “reshape” function when setting the text. See line 12 below.

[code language=”java” highlight=”11,12″]
protected void addQuestionText(FormEntryPrompt p) {
String imageURI = p.getImageText();
String audioURI = p.getAudioText();
String videoURI = p.getSpecialFormQuestionText(“video”);

// shown when image is clicked
String bigImageURI = p.getSpecialFormQuestionText(“big-image”);

// Add the text view. Textview always exists, regardless of whether there’s text.
mQuestionText = new TextView(getContext());
// mQuestionText.setText(p.getLongText()); smap
mQuestionText.setText(ArabicUtilities.reshape(p.getLongText())); // smap
mQuestionText.setTextSize(TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_DIP, mQuestionFontsize);
mQuestionText.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD);
mQuestionText.setPadding(0, 0, 0, 7);
mQuestionText.setId(QuestionWidget.newUniqueId()); // assign random id

// Wrap to the size of the parent view
mQuestionText.setHorizontallyScrolling(false);

if (p.getLongText() == null) {
mQuestionText.setVisibility(GONE);
}

// Create the layout for audio, image, text
mediaLayout = new MediaLayout(getContext());
mediaLayout.setAVT(p.getIndex(), “”, mQuestionText, audioURI, imageURI, videoURI, bigImageURI);

addView(mediaLayout, mLayout);
}
[/code]

This improved the display significantly:
SC20130708-172712

This Arabic version of fieldTask is available for download from http://dev/smap.com.au. There are other widgets that could have this functionality added and presumably the arabic text typed by an enumerator in a text field should also be reshaped. These additional changes will be made on an as needs basis. The preferred option is to get a phone that supports Arabic fonts natively which would be a better option than having to root the phones to install new fonts.

Announcement of Smap Release – April 2013

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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