Collect will need to stop using /sdcard/odk for files

Apologies for the delayed response. I couldn't get to this until now due to competing priorities.

TLDR: The forks aren't going away. We likely will address the scoped storage requirement, but not necessarily the same way as mainline Collect.

What meaning does the "now" in "now forked" have? The fork of openhds tablet happened circa-2015 and the fork of collect only just happened within the last few months. They are also very different in nature.

After working with original team from the University of Southern Maine, I eventually took over development of their existing fork of openhds for the same project on Bioko Island. I just "production"-ized it by giving it a home, branding it, and fixing its major flaws to function for its intended purpose (which was not the same as openhds). There wasn't an active online openhds development community to integrate back to, and many of the changes that needed to happen were not clear conceptual fits with a demographic surveillance system. To my knowledge, it is the only actively developed fork of that project, including the original.

The collect fork happened for different reasons. Mainly, instability of updates from Google Play kept breaking our daily operation of around 50-100 devices. However, I had been reluctantly considering the need prior to that, for similar reasons to the openhds fork: its purpose is not really the same as collect. Many features that would not make sense in Collect (as it exists today) make perfect sense for the fork. For that reason I don't see it going away, at least until the project does. However, we want to track as closely with mainline as possible, both to keep maintenance reasonable, as well as to continue to benefit from all of the great work the ODK community is doing.

Yes, we will likely be adressing the scoped storage requirement for CIMS Forms within the next couple of weeks. We are interested in a Collect solution, but don't expect direct support of any kind (including expedited delivery of an api) from the ODK community. This will likely be bundled with changes to way the apps integrate, since the Collect model had some undesirable quirks that we will want to address.

I can't speak to Project Buendia, but we are not solely tracking patients. We actually track households and inhabitants on Bioko Island for accurate coverage reporting and other metrics. We also have plans on expanding that support to track arbitrary entities, since different organizational units want to leverage the same shared database during inital data collection for easier analytics downstream. For example, tracking bednets, informal drug dispensaries, private clinics, etc.

Happy to expand on or clarify any of this if anyone is interested.

Thanks for the context, @Batkinson. If you're up for it, I propose we hop on a quick call to discuss the scoped storage and app integration changes we're both planning. It's likely we'll have to do at least some of the same work so I think it would be beneficial to coordinate a little bit, especially since you hope to track the Collect mainline. I'll follow up with you directly and I can report back on this thread.

In the mean time, I have also checked in with @Jason_Rogena and @Kigamba at Ona and they have confirmed that they continue to maintain app integrations through the /sdcard/odk/ folder.

I had a great conversation with @Batkinson about this and a number of topics of common interest. After Wednesday's TSC call, the plan is to wait at least until Collect v.1.27 before releasing an API so that we can learn more about the needs of real users with integrations. @Batkinson found that reasonable. In the mean time, he and I will discuss any tentative plans we may have for the replacement API and try to make sure that the solution will be reusable for all.

Thanks, @Batkinson!

The migration implementation is now in beta. Learn more and try it out at ODK Collect v1.26 Beta 1: scoped storage migration.

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Hi @ln,

Sorry for not replying, it seems my notifications are off & I'm late to the changes to getodk :smiley:

Ona is about to start adapting some of our apps, WHO Steps app, to using scoped storage & ensuring that the integrations to ODK Collect are updated. I found some code that generates a CSV used for the pulldata function in the form. We were solving the CSV media file hackily by adding it to the ODK form media folder. It seems that this is the only feature that does not use the ContentProvider or the activity hooks.

Do you have any ideas off the top of your head? If not, I can get back with several options later & we can see what would be good.

I don't have this in my brain anymore so definitely take my thoughts here with a grain of salt.

I think the general approach would be for external apps to hand Collect URI(s) to form definition and/or media files with permissions through an intent extra. I vaguely remember giving some thought to where this should go and I think my conclusion was that it should be a new, dedicated activity that takes whatever URI(s), copies the files into the Collect directory, registers them in the database and generally gets them ready for use.

Even though you're only looking to register media files (in this case a CSV) with Collect, I think the solution design should also include registering a form definition. Those are tightly related and we'd want to make sure that they're handled coherently. Additionally, whatever we come up with, we should then later be able to add something symmetrical for handing submissions to Collect.

Would be great to see some of your ideas.

This is a much more well thought out & it makes clear sense. Let me collect my thoughts and see what I can come up with

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@Kigamba, here is the release timeline we're looking at:

  • v1.28 released ~mid August with message that v1.29 will force the migration
  • v1.29 released ~mid October that forces the migration on first app launch

You can read more in the Collect issue to change the banner text.

That means if you do still want to add support for external applications handing form definitions and media files to Collect, there should be a proposed approach by mid-August at the latest (in time for v1.29 planning). A PR in mid-September would be ideal so there's plenty of time to go through quality assurance. The last chance to get a PR in would probably be the last week of September.

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is that why I have been unable to submit my data since yesterday? (9/07/2020)

@LN Thanks for the update. I'm working on getting resources allocated so that I can start on this. I think that the September deadline is considerate enough. The August timeline for proposing an approach also sounds good. Sorry for the silence on my end. I'll communicate in due time. Thanks again for the update

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Hi @Agumash
I can assure you it's not related. Maybe there is something wrong with your server. Please create a separate topic if you can't solve your problem by yourself.

BTW welcome to the forum! Please introduce yourself here!

Welcome to the community @Agumash

@LN :disappointed: I couldn't get the resources to work on it now. We'll reach out when the situation changes & I get a go-ahead

:smiley: We also discovered that the files are accessible for some android versions inside the /data folder. However, they are private on Android 9. The support team & some users tend to copy over the failed submissions for sending with ODK Briefcast on a computer

Did you use the documented path and adb? What precisely do you see when you attempt access?

Thanks for that. I can access the submissions now both through the file manager and ADB. :man_facepalming: It seems that I had forgotten to perform the migration on the Android 9 device while testing on the devices. Sorry for that :pray:. Thanks again

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There are two changes coming up as we fully finalize this transition:

  • In v1.30, planned to be released around 2/22, new installations will no longer perform migrations from /sdcard/odk. If you upgrade from an older Collect installation still using /sdcard/odk, your data will be migrated. If you had previously used an older version of Collect, then uninstalled it, then install Collect v1.30, anything in the /scdard/odk folder will be ignored.
  • In v1.31, likely out in May, migrations will not be performed at all. If you have data in /sdcard/odk that you want to use, you'll need to either manually move the folders with adb or first install v1.29 or under and then upgrade to v1.31 after a successful migration.

This should have no impact on most users.

For organizations that choose to stay on a well-known Collect version for some time, this information could help inform the timeline for their next upgrade.

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As described in the prior post, migrations from /sdcard/odk/ will no longer be performed starting with the next Collect version, now called v2021.2 (versioning change discussion).

Additionally, we plan to remove some update and delete functionality currently provided by FormsProvider and InstanceProvider. This is only relevant to applications that deeply integrate with Collect (e.g. OpenHDS, ODK Clinic). As far as we know, after the storage migration, there are no meaningful update or delete actions to take. If you access the ContentProviders for Collect v1.30.1 and use update or delete, please reply and describe what your app does.

We are making this change because as far as we know, there is nothing useful to do with update and delete without also being able to read and write corresponding form definition and form instance files. Additionally, as @seadowg started writing tests for the update and delete behavior, he identified several bugs and inexplicable behavior. We have to change the implementation of the ContentProviders for multiple project support and it would be best if we could avoid carrying forward undocumented behavior that we don't fully understand.

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Is it possible to have an option under ODK settings where you can choose where you want ODK to store its files?

Allowing such configuration would make apps that read data from ODK collect relevant.

Hi @samiek, this will not be possible.

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Hi @LN hope you doing well,

i'm owais and joined the forum recently and i'm here to bring up some previous discussions that you had with @Kigamba and which was started here Collect will need to stop using /sdcard/odk for files - #23 by Kigamba and you propose the solution here Collect will need to stop using /sdcard/odk for files - #24 by LN. So basically i will need to load some pre-loaded data from CSV to ODK form by using an external app. So, just want to know your thoughts about the latest implementation of how we can achieve this. Thanks