Here is the November release of Smap. We did not release an update in October, although you may have noticed that the version number of some server installations said 21.10, but if you clicked on the link for changes it just took you back to the September changes. Unfortunately I never got around to creating the release notes so officially October never existed.

New Features

Specialised PDF components

There is a new question type “pdf_field” so you can specify specialised components to be included in a PDF report. Documentation is here. Currently two new components are available and they are intended for use in reporting faults in cables or pipelines. However now that the framework has been created, we can add additional components. Let the Smap team know if there is anything you would like.

Component 1 – Fault Image

This component is given the names of the questions that record, start of cable segment, end of cable segment and fault position. It then shows these in an image that includes the distance from the cable segment start to the first fault and the distance from the end of the cable segment to the second fault.

Component 2 – Fault Map

The input to this component is the same as the input to the image component but this time the information is shown on a map.

Background Report Generation

Just as the new PDF components are specialised, this new background report generation may not be useful for many organisations. However it has been added to help large organisations.

The first report that has been converted to background generation is the user usage report on the form management page, if your organisation has thousands of users and millions of submissions then this can take a long time and report generations for these large organisations have been failing.

Now once the report has been requested a message will be displayed saying that the report generation is in progress and the completed report can be found on the reports page.

To access reports select the menu “modules” and then “reports”. The reports generated for the last two weeks are shown here and can be downloaded by clicking on the report’s blue button. If the report is taking a while to complete you may see its status as “Pending” rather than “Complete”.

The previous functionality available on the reports page can be found under the tab “Public Reports”. This still allows you to define a report and then get the URL to that live data report that you can share with other people.

Allow webform links to tasks to be completed multiple times

Previously if you created a task as part of an email campaign then that task could only be completed once. However there are applications where you want a task, preloaded with some specific data, to be completed multiple times. For example if you have a barcode that links to a task and you want that task for that url to be preloaded with a venue location say. Documentation.

Other

• The version of fieldTask used to synchronise with the server is now included in the user audit log. This also requires fieldTask version 6.515+. Documentation.

Bug Fixes

• Survey forms that do not have any questions no longer cause an obscure error to be displayed when they are downloaded on to fieldTask. Instead when the user opens the survey on fieldTask they will see a helpful message stating that the form has no questions.
• When getting an email address from survey data in order to send a notification, previously the name of the question was used in the data query instead of the column name of the question. If the question name contained characters that were not valid as table column names then this would not have worked.