Briefcase error importing from Collect: "Not an ODK collect directory (did not find both the forms and instances child directories)"

Hi! Having a similar issue that I've been trying to solve with no positive results so far. During my field work I manually copied and pasted all my finalized ODK forms from my phone to a local folder on my PC, then deleted the originals on the phone to clear everything for the next day. Now it doesn't seem to work to load these files into briefcase from the local folders. I get error messengers saying:

"Not an ODK collect directory (did not find both the forms and instances child directories).

Anyone who successfully have been able to convert the XML files to CSV using any other conversion application?

Many thanks in advance!

Hi Astrid,

I’ve split out the topic because it’s not clear this is the same problem. Can you please answer the questions below?

  • What is the problem? Please be detailed.
  • What ODK tool and version are you using? And on what device and operating system version?
  • What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?
  • What you have you tried to fix the problem?
  • Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach here.

Does your directory contain both a forms/ folder and an instances/ folder? Briefcase needs to know about your form's structure from the form XML so that it can export the data. If you've only pulled the submissions, put those in an instances directory and then create a forms directory with just the form XML in it. Then try to import the folder that contains those two into Briefcase.

If that doesn't work for you, please fill out @yanokwa's template!