Form attachment on S3 works in Enketo but not Web Forms or Collect

Support
1

Hello,

at our INRAE research institute in France, we manage a central ODK server and have nearly 250 users across 76 projects. Thank you to getODK for deploying this open-source tool, which is widely used at our research institute. To manage account requests and first-level enquiries, we have an internal ticketing system at INRAE. We have received an incident report containing two queries. Question 1: Forms using ODK Web Form that incorporate media (including images, which appear with a white cross when viewed in a web browser) are not working. However, these same forms still work in Enketo (see screenshot of error message) Question 2: It is not possible to download new forms containing media files in the ODK Collect and GIC Collect apps. The form update icon in the top right-hand corner of the app displays an exclamation mark (see screenshot)

Recently, the server administration team had to move media files from forms – or those collected via forms – to an INRAE S3 bucket to reduce the load on the server. We suspect that the two issues are linked to this and relate to the subject of this discussion. What do you think? Do you have any specific advice or resources to help us resolve these incidents?

Best regards,

Sylvie Ladet (Inrae Toulouse): gedeop-odk-admin[at]inrae.fr

error_message_inrae_060726
error_message_inrae_060726985Ă—179 9.24 KB

error_exclamation point _inrae_060726
error_exclamation point _inrae_0607261200Ă—1920 111 KB

See versions of ODK Central INRAE :

versions:

6b1ac3b8a8f4b21c74eda22d4773a332a4c724e3 (v2026.1.2-1-g6b1ac3b)

56b6bbdb4cac59aa850e3ddd1cd19ab9f2be1af3 client (v2026.1.2)

142c1c85501d90d225116862ba79dd914c5fcfc1 server (v2026.1.1)

2

It does seem very likely that the move to S3 is related. This feels like some kind of permission issue. For Enketo, images are proxied through the backend whereas they're requested directly from S3 by Web Forms and Collect. Maybe your S3 bucket is configured to only accept connections from the Central server? That would not be sufficient.

You can find the recommended configuration in the documentation.

If that doesn't give you a useful hint, can you please share any error details you may have? When you click on "Technical error details" in Web Forms, do you get anything else? When you swipe down in Collect and open the notification about the failed update, anything there?

Merci!

3

Hi Helene

Your reply confirms our assumption. We are in contact with INRAE’s IT department to ask them to extend the access rights to the ODK S3 storage space where we upload the media files referenced in our forms or collected. We will keep you informed and get back to you if this does not resolve the issue. Have a good day

4

Hello Hélène,
We’ve managed to sort out our issue with accessing the media files for our forms, which had been moved to an INRAE S3 bucket.
It turned out to be a matter of CORS rules and the bucket’s policy. Some obscure JSON that we had to add to the bucket’s configuration… Thanks, AI!

Have a good afternoon

Sylvie