Community Poll: Central Entity uploads from file

Community
1

Reply by October 2nd!

Hello all! We are working hard on Entities. Entities are a way to represent people, places and things that can be shared between forms and updated over time. They make it easier to do things like longitudinal data collection or case management. You can learn more in the documentation.

We are starting to look at bulk uploading Entity data directly into Central from data files, which we know is necessary for many of you to begin making use of Entities.

We have a lot of work to do and questions to answer in this area, but for now we are starting with a couple basic questions that we're curious for feedback on.

Question 1
Given the choice, would you prefer to upload Entity data files to Central as CSV files (Comma Separated Value) or Excel files? What's easier for you to imagine doing? If it doesn't matter to you or you're not sure, select both.

  • CSV (.csv) files
  • Excel (.xlsx) files
0 voters

Question 2
How often do you need to bulk load Entity data from a data file? Please choose all that apply.

  • Once, when the project begins, I will load all the data from a file
  • Sometimes I want to replace all the Entity data with the data from a file
  • Sometimes I want to add many Entities to the existing records in Central, from a file
0 voters

Thank you for participating and giving us valuable feedback! Your experiences help shape our decisions.

Please feel free to leave additional comments below with your needs for a bulk upload Entities feature. Do you upload on a schedule, for example every week? Do you have a strange file format you have to deal with? Does your bulk data come out of some other system or process? We can't address everything but hearing your individual stories and the context around your use of the feature can help us even more than the responses to this poll.

The polls will close in 2 weeks, on October 2nd. Thank you!

4 Likes
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@tgachet you mentioned in another thread:

Would you be willing to say a little bit more about your use case? In particular, it would be helpful to know roughly what your entities represent. Are they values that change rarely but need to be shared between forms (e.g. county names)?

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Hi!

In my use case, entity lists are subject to change regularly (e.g study id or name, observer's company, geojson localisation). These data don't have to be shared between forms because they are generated from a third-party web application and I want to share them to my forms in Central (no liked forms yet).
Actually, I use the media .csv function to update the lists but this requires publishing every time a new version of the form in Central (and downloading all media each time on the ODK collect side).

I would like to be able to automate the reporting of entity lists without having to publish a new version and without having to download all the entity lists in ODK Collect once in the field.

I hope I'm clear enough! :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
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Thank you, @tgachet, that makes a lot of sense! In that case, you might actually be well-served already by the API I described in the other thread! As you've tried it, does it feel like it would work for your needs or do would you have a strong preference for a way to specify your updates in a single file? I imagine that since this would be done programmatically you'd have a preference for CSV over XLSX, right?