Briefcase export by date

Support
1

This might be somewhere between support and feature...

1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.
When using Briefcase to export data it is possible to set start and dates for submitted forms / instances. However (to me), it is counter-intuitive for the date to relate to when it was submitted, rather than when the form was completed / data collected. In order to identify the instance that I'm looking for, I need to navigate into the Briefcase Storage (dangerous!) find the instance (more by luck than judgement) and then open the xml to find "submissionDate" variable.
When I log in to Aggregate I can't see when instances were submitted, so I don't know how I'm supposed to track the submissionDate. If it's in the Docs related to Briefcase I missed it, apologies (and it's not clear that the date range relates to submission date)...

I have a case where a fieldworker uploaded a set of instances but one of them appears to have got lost (it was marked as sent on his phone but wasn't on the server). So after trawling the forum (thank you!) I found out about the 'show sent forms' feature, and was able to get the data uploaded to Aggregate. Phew!

Because this is now some time after the data was collected and I have analysed the rest, I wanted just to pull that instance from Aggregate and export it. The pull was fine (resolved against my Briefcase storage), but the export has been more tricky. Although there was only one instance completed on a given date, I have ended up exporting the instances that were submitted on a different date (13) into a separate folder. Now I have to merge the form data and repeat groups into my dataset - which means going through the CSV or using a script in my GIS to avoid duplicating records...

This would have been much easier if I could select the instance and export that/those (for example), or export the instance based on the completion date (which might not help others who are doing multiple forms in one day) or another criterion / filter.

So my SUPPORT question is: How do I find the submission date more easily than opening the xml submission?

And my FEATURE REQUEST (which might already exist but I can't find it easily) would be to have an option to export instances from a list that includes some of the fields within the submission (e.g. Instance name) and can be filtered. I recognise that not every one uses the 'today' question, but maybe time-specific meta-data could be inserted?

2. What app or server are you using and on what device and operating system? Include version numbers.
Old version of Aggregate on Appspot - can't face another fight with AWS yet. I know, sorry.
Briefcase 1.14

3. What you have you tried to fix the problem?
Trial and error selecting dates for when the form was completed and finding no exports... then searching storage as above and guessing the date related to submissionDate
4. What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?
I hope other people can avoid that!

2

Thanks for the detailed post, @seewhy!

We use the submitted date from the server because it's the safest date to use. If we use the date the form was completed, we'd have to rely on the device's clock and that's sometimes very wrong.

You can see the submissionDate in Aggregate by displaying the metadata. This is documented at https://docs.opendatakit.org/aggregate-data/#filtering-submissions.

In that same metadata view, you are able to find the instanceID which can be helpful if you want to find a specific submission in the Briefcase Storage folder -- the instance folder names are the instanceID.

Note that the same section in the filtering docs also shows you how to filter by whatever (including some other date). You can export a filtered subsection of records in Aggregate (but not Briefcase).

As far as your specific question, I really like ripgrep for this. It's a command line tool, but it's crazy fast. If you'd like something with a graphical user interface, a good text editor will do this searching too. Good free options are Notepad++ on Windows and BBEdit on a Mac. I use and love SublimeText, but it's not free.

A filtered export on Briefcase isn't a crazy idea, but it's also a lot of work. And I'm not sure what the UI would look like. Perhaps you can write and sketch out how you'd expect this to work at https://forum.getodk.org/c/features?