This is an initial step towards servers (e.g. Central) being able to manage more of the client (e.g. Collect) user experience. This feature description was developed with @issa from feedback given during Central user interviews.
1. What is the general goal of the feature?
Data collectors can end up with test or old forms on their devices. That can make it harder to find the correct form in Fill Blank Form. Similarly, data collectors may forget to download or update some of the forms that they’re supposed to fill out leading to incomplete data collection.
This feature would make it possible to instruct Collect to exactly match the forms that a project administrator has made available for the App User in Central.
With a server that has this feature turned on, when the data collector taps Get Blank Form, all forms would be selected and grayed out to indicate that their state can’t be changed. At the bottom of the screen, there would be a single Update
button.
When the user taps the Update
button:
- all form definitions in the form list sent by Central would be downloaded or updated
- all form definitions not in the form list sent by Central would become invisible in
Fill Blank Form
(soft delete)
Filled forms associated with soft deleted form definitions would still be available in Edit Saved Form
, Send Finalized Form
, and View Sent Form
. Soft deleted form definitions and associated submissions would be visible from Delete Saved Form
. Once all submissions associated with a soft deleted form are deleted, the corresponding form definition is also deleted.
If a form that was previously soft deleted is downloaded again, it will become visible in Fill Blank Form
.
2. What are some example use cases for this feature?
-
During field testing for a new data collection project, a project manager publishes a new form that replaces a previously-used one. Currently, she personally updates every data collector’s device to make sure that obsolete forms are removed from the devices and that the correct versions of all forms are added. Using this proposed feature, data collectors can tap a single button to ensure that the forms on their device matches the ones that they should use.
-
A project manager has retired 3 forms that no longer need to be filled. Using this feature, data collectors can tap a single button to ensure that they won’t accidentally fill those forms out.
-
A data collector collects data for several organizations. On a day when she is working on Project A, she can log in as the App User for that project, tap a single button to get all the forms related to that project and clear out the ones she doesn’t need.
3. What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?
Project management, Collect implementation.