How to remove group names when downloading data from Central

Support
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1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.

Not a problem, just would like to know if there's a way to remove group names when downloading the data from ODK Central. This option is available in Briefcase but when we use Briefcase, the SubmissionDate column is empty. In processing our data, we need to have the field names without the group names and we also need the SubmissionDate column data.

Thank you very much.

Vinia

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Hi @Vinia_Marciano! ODK Central does not currently (as of v1.0) have an option to remove group names from the column headers in the submission CSV download.

What software are you using to manage or analyze your data? Could you say more about what would be useful about being able to remove group names? Is it to make the column headers more easily readable, or does the software you're using have limits related to the length of column headers? (For example, I think the maximum length of a variable name in Stata is 32 characters.)

You can use ODK Briefcase to remove group names, but like you said, right now the SubmissionDate column will be empty when you use Briefcase to pull from Central. Right now there's not a simple way to both remove group names and download submission dates. You could use Briefcase to remove group names, but you'd have to obtain submission dates another way and merge the two data sources using the submission instance ID.

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Hi Matthew @Matthew_White
Thank you so much for this. Saves us time trying to search for a workaround. This would be a bit tedious though but thank you so much for the information. I hope future versions of ODK Central would allow removing of group names, or future versions of Briefcase would include SubmissionDate in exports...

Again, your response is very much appreciated. Good day!

Cheers,

Vinia

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