Hi,
I find it a bit counter-intuitive that I can go to "edit saved forms",
click on a form that says "finalized", edit the answers and save it again.
I am not sure why this is possible and if there's a setting I need to
remove in order to disable this from happening to prevent fraud... Thanks
for the help.
E
Hi Esther,
Go into admin settings and uncheck the tab Edit saved form under USER CAN ACCESS MAIN MENU ITEMS. Unfortunately this option will also disable any edit options for the saved from.
Kenneth
Okay, thank you so much.
Esther
Hi Esther,
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but I wanted to explain why we have
this behavior.
With ODK, it's possible to have a form that has invalid data and you
can't test that until all data has been entered.
For example, you can have a blank form with a default date of Jan 1,
1900 and a constraint that requires dates to be in the future. That
form can be valid or invalid depending on whether or not the
enumerator changes the date. And if that date is wrapped by a branch,
it's possible that some users will have invalid data and others won't.
For these reasons, we have to "finalize" forms. In that finalization
process, we walk through the entire form and we follow the branches
the user has taken and make sure every question's constraints and
requirements are satisfied. Only then can you send. So that's what
finalization means. It means the form is valid and ready to send.
In the early days of ODK Collect, each question had to pass validation
(e.g., required, constraints) before you could proceed. In that model,
when you got to the end of the form, you knew that the entire form had
been validated before you sent data, so no finalization had to take
place.
The problem with this approach is that in the real world, users want
to be able to jump around in the form and save data that may or may
not be valid. They can do this by jumping around or by changing the
constraint processing behavior in the settings of Collect.
So that's the distinction between Saved Forms and Finalized Forms.
Now, why can you edit Finalized Forms? Well, given what I've
described, why not? It's not clear to me that it prevents fraud and I
would love to understand more about what kind of fraud you'd like to
protect against.
Yaw
P.S. I think we can do a lot better job explaining what Finalized
means and I'm hoping we can tackle that in a UI rework of Collect.
Hi,
I am trying to edit some forms "marked as finalized" on ODK collect, but couldn't figure out how to do it on odk v2022.1.2.
Any recommendation on to edit the forms when they are "marked as finalized"
Thanks
Please how can I edit forms marked as finalized?
Thank you
What do you mean by couldn't figure out how to do it? If your forms are still on your device you should be able to go to Edit Saved Form section and open any of the forms there.