ODK Central v2022.3

We are excited to announce a new release of ODK Central, the ODK server.

If you haven't used Central, the easiest way to get started is with ODK Cloud. Our cloud hosting provides Central servers with automatic updates, daily backups, uptime guarantees, and fast support.

If you are technical and prefer to self-host and rely on community support, start with our installation docs.

If you are using ODK Cloud, we'll be rolling out these updates in the coming days. If you are not using ODK Cloud, follow the upgrade instructions. If you have disabled or customized Sentry and have not already upgraded to v1.5.3, then you will also need to follow the special upgrade instructions here.

:warning: Managed backups include all of your collected data but do not include sufficient information to re-establish the same Web Form links. If you use managed backups and Web Form links, read this. :warning:


Release Overview

ODK Central v2022.3 includes many stability improvements and bugfixes. It also introduces experimental preview of Datasets and Entities functionality for entity-based data collection.

Datasets and Entities brings the data you are collecting back out to Forms and devices in the field, enabling better context and data validation when gathering information about anything longitudinally over many visits.

With Datasets and Entities, Central automatically puts incoming submission information into form attachments used by follow-up Forms, so data collectors can always get the latest data just by updating with their Central server.

Get started by learning now to build a Dataset-populating Form.

This functionality is experimental. You won't experience data loss using it, but we may change critical aspects of how it works as we improve it.

Other Highlights

Thanks in part to feedback from our users, we have made a number of additional improvements:

  • Web forms (Enketo) are now configured to match the relevance behavior of ODK Collect. For more details, please see this topic.
  • Add the ability to filter Submissions on multiple Review States.
  • Add the ability to filter Submissions on multiple submitters.
  • Allow the user to select more than 100 columns to view, but show a warning.
  • Add support for the $select OData query parameter.
  • Rename “Media File” to “Form Attachment” or “Submission Attachment”.
  • Handle Form titles that contain the characters &, <, or >.
  • Return the correct API response after comment creation.
  • Return combined verbs over the API if a User is assigned multiple Roles on a Project.
  • Return a Problem response if an API user specifies a number that is too large.
  • Improve the handling of unexpected errors.
  • Fix an issue starting multiple instances of the API server.
  • Add Content Security Policy reporting.
    • If you have disabled or customized Sentry, you will need to make changes to your Central installation. For more information, please see the docs.
  • Prevent a reboot loop if openssl fails.
  • Remove duplicate logging for service.
  • Don't run the server if a database migration was removed as part of a Central downgrade.
  • Add load testing.
  • Changed to year-based versioning to match Collect.
  • Update pyxform to support entities.
  • Update translations.
    • If your language is missing from Central, please contribute it.

As always, we have updated our User Documentation and API Documentation for the latest changes.

More notes about changes to the API for v2022.3 can be found in the API Changelog, which lists additions, breaking changes, and other things of note for each major release.

What's Next

To learn more about the roadmap for Central, read What's coming in Central over the next few years.

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ODK Central v2022.3.1 is now available. It fixes an issue where values in groups showed as blank in Excel and Power BI when using the OData feed.

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