Automation of form creation and aggregate uploading

Support
1

Hi,

This is a bit advanced. Has anyone tried to automate the form creation and uploading on Aggregate?

Here is what I am thinking: I have a dropdown question which has an OTHER field, which on selection, opens a text input to be entered. The new data entered, after submission, ideally should become another option of the same dropdown question on the server (not on the client, yet), so that someone else could select it too instead of typing. For this to work, I am breaking down the whole process into 3 steps:

  1. Pull the options data (including recently submitted) from database, output it into the form of aggregate-accepted XML file using some programming language (for testing, I am deliberately ignoring the possibility of compiling errors for now). It's not too difficult to do.

  2. Push the new form/file into aggregate, to update the form.

  3. The users can be alerted that new form version is present via SMS (I have this leg working already), and they can download the fresh form with more answer options. Ideally, Collect should have some auto-download feature, but let's ignore it for now too.

While steps 1 and 3 are workable, I am stuck with step 2. Is there a way to make aggregate pick up the form XML file from some location on the server and automatically load it to its database?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Saad

1 Like
2

You could consider using Briefcase's command line mode as part of a script. See the documentation. I think that to update an existing definition you'll need to use the -fsb (force send blank) switch.

Have you tried auto-download? Is there a reason it doesn't work for you? In General Settings > Form management, you can configure the frequency of update checks and have the forms be automatically downloaded.