Thanks to @MatthewMac & @LN for solving this. With Enketo support up and running on central 1.0 I have now had a quick look at the public links feature.
My first impressions are
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It is really great! Being able to send specific link to different individuals or groups is very useful for lots of purposes
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Particularly good that the submission data on the database includes the name of the link that was used to send the data
- So if I make a link for user "Jeff", I can see that Jeff's link sent the data in the CSV
SubmitterName
field. - That means that if I am doing a cohort study I can send each participant a unique link and they don't need to enter their personal details as I already have them and they'll automatically be added to the form. This is really good for data security and for auditing percentage of participants who have responded.
Some things that would make it even more useful would be
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Batch create public links (i.e. for hundreds or thousands of users).
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On screen count of number of submissions received from each link
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Ability to reallocate a link to a new form.
- For instance if I have a longitudinal study, but the form changes each month, the user can use the same link for every time-point but they actually end up at a different form according to settings I provision within central. In principle this could currently be achieved using a different version of the form, which is fine if the study is synchronous (i.e. if the cohort are all at the same stage in the study on any given day), but doesn't work with a rolling or staggered recruitment approach.
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Ability to change the URL of links to something unique & memorable and without lots of slashes, hyphens etc (I think this is on the feature list already)
i.e. at the moment we have something like
central.lshtm.ac.uk//-/single/djX34d3EsJGTvdjbvCbIEWz16kZ8oY8?st=XZSPPeWNEw1aX!hpagdyL72QyF87mgX0546BCbVqW...
but what would be good would be
central.lshtm.ac.uk/covidsurvey
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Customisable confirmation/thanks screen. Super useful for adding for instance a link to results website, or more details on project
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Option to email results or a notification of submission via a specific link to a prespecified address. i.e. if there's a form that needs to be sent to a key person as soon as it is filled. This can be very useful for people who are running a form that only gets filled occasionally (i.e. a request for user account for ODK central [how meta!]) or which is used in emergency (i.e. like a serious adverse event in a clinical trial)