We are excited to announce a new release of ODK Central, the ODK server.
What's new
Entities let you share information between forms so you can collect longitudinal data, manage cases over time, and represent other complex workflows. You can now see Entities on the homepage along with the Forms for each project. This will help you see the total Entity landscape on your Central server. New to Entities? Watch this quick overview from @LN.
Add participant XLSForm · Participant follow-up XLSForm
Single Sign-on (SSO) with OpenId Connect (OIDC) is here! With SSO, you can use your username, password, and multi-factor auth (MFA) from a platform like Google Workspace, Azure AD, or Auth0 instead of using credentials just for Central. To configure SSO for your Central server, please see the documentation.
@mathieubossaert and other super users requested the ability to filter repeat tables in OData feed and that request has been fulfilled. Now you can use $root/Submissions/__system/<field> to filter repeat tables. See API Docs for more details.
Previously, when you uploaded a new Form, the "New" Submission button took some time to activate. Now you'll see it enable immediately.
Beyond the above features, we have made 30+ fixes and enhancements that make ODK Central more enjoyable. For the complete list, please see the release notes.
You can see our updated User Documentation and API Documentation to learn more about these features and how to use them.
How to get these changes?
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 haven’t upgraded to the prior releases (2023.2 or 2023.3) yet, please take note that they are critical infrastructure upgrades that may take more time. There are also some new upgrade instructions for this release, so please review them even if you are familiar with upgrading ODK Central servers.
If you haven't used Central, the easiest way to get started is with ODK Cloud. ODK Cloud is official managed hosting of Central on our fast, reliable, and secure infrastructure. It's fully-managed and fully-supported so you can focus on collecting the data you need.
If you are technical and prefer to self-host and rely on community support, start with our installation docs.
What's next
For the next release, we will add more features in our Entities world. See getodk.org/roadmap for a more detailed roadmap.