Entities not saving

Support
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1

1. What is the issue? Please be detailed.

“Save_to” field (property) data are not recorded to the entity list.

I am creating an ODK form to visit households. Currently known information is stored in an entity list. The user first selects a geographic area from a list, then selects from the streets in this area. Then selects the household from the street. She or he then knocks on the door of the house and asks for the specific person listed in the entity list. If the person is not available, another person can substitute and their name and phone number is recorded along with questionnaire responses. At the end of the interview, the enumerator chooses the status of the visit. No one home, refused, completed, come back at a specific time, etc. The status and a few other data points are supposed to be recorded in the entity list according to the field (property) specified in the survey “save_to” column.

The next day, or later in the same day, the same enumerator or another enumerator may return to the street. The initial household selection should exclude households with a completion status. This cannot happen because status data cannot be saved to the entity list.

2. What steps can we take to reproduce this issue?

I have included an abbreviated ODX-XLSFORM with my current iteration.

ODK-Central version:
896ceca5a1936faaf4d4b83264551a3acab29be8 (v2025.4.0-2-g896ceca)
bd1be46611410f2c1f441b154f4d625b27e093c5 client (v2025.4.0)
97981e9694f392e5b3df90a2d28c6f7d3aefef17 server (v2025.4.0)

ODK Collect v2026.2.1

3. What have you tried to fix the issue?

I have tried the brute force method of attempting every combination of configuration that I can think of, spending several days doing so. The list would be too long to specify, even if I could remember all that I tried.

4. Upload any forms or screenshots you can share publicly below.

walk_list.csv (1.6 KB)

ODK_wont_save_to_entity_list_abbreviated.xlsx (153.2 KB)

2

Hi @cooperativeventure

Just to clarify - are entities not being created/updated at all, or are they created but the save_to property values aren't being saved to them?

If it is not just a problem with populating properties, it may be caused by entity_id not resolving to a valid UUID. In your form it's set to concat(precinct, "_", address), which won't produce a valid entity ID see: https://getodk.github.io/xforms-spec/entities#declaring-that-a-form-creates-entities

3

Thanks Grzesiek

The form as intended does not create new entity (records). The form is only supposed to update the specific record.

I skimmed through the link you gave and changed the entity_id to “voter,” which is of the form “3d66am7f-1cbf-4e21-a3d8-67z503211b9f... .“ It still will not update the entity list.

4

so why there is true() in both update_if and create_if?

5

Yes, that was dumb. I have now removed that, but it made no difference.

6

Thanks for your help Grzesiek2010

I resolved the issue on the enity tab like this:

entity_id
coalesce(${respondent}, uuid())

Cheers,

Joe

7

Glad you have it working now, @cooperativeventure! If you have suggestions to improve documentation or functionality, please let us know. We agree this is not very intuitive and I've written a little on the topic at Missing Entity ID with form that can create or update Entities - #3 by LN

This helped us identify a bug, thank you! Although we recommend using explicit non-overlapping condition, our intent was to do an "upsert" (create if new, update if existing) in that case. We will fix this in v2026.3. In the mean time, the fix is to make sure your conditions don't overlap.