ODK Central v2025.1: Form drafts, visual redesign, pagination, Web Forms, and Entity deletion

We're excited to announce ODK Central v2025.1! This latest release has five new features to make your data collection even easier.

What's new

:pencil: Form drafts


We’ve grouped all form functionality on a single page from the new “Edit Form” tab. This makes editing forms, attaching files, and testing a more seamless experience!

:artist_palette: Visual redesign

We’ve updated the look and feel of Central’s homepage, headers and breadcrumbs for an improved page hierarchy and ease of navigation.

:open_book: Pagination

We’ve replaced the infinite scroll on the Submissions and Entity Data pages with pagination to improve their performance.

:check_box_with_check: Opt-in to Web Forms

Users will now be able to opt-in to Web Forms from Central on a per-form basis! Web Forms can be used on any device (including iOS).

:wastebasket: Entity deletion

Entities can now be deleted! Deleted entities will be stored for 30 days with the option to restore before being permanently purged.


How to get these improvements?

If you are using Central on ODK Cloud, we'll be rolling out these updates in the coming days. If you are self-hosting Central, follow the upgrade instructions!


What’s next

Currently, when a form has an Entity List attached, all Entities are always sent to all users that request the Entity List. For some projects, this is a significant barrier to adoption of Entities either because of privacy concerns or because their Entity Lists are so large that it’s not practical to always download them fully.

Our next release will focus on limiting Entity access for data collectors.

See more of what we have planned at https://getodk.org/roadmap!

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ODK Central v2025.1.1 is now available. It includes the following changes:

  • Update ODK Web Forms to 0.11.1
  • Enable buttons that link to ODK Web Forms even if Enketo isn't running
  • Prevent Data Collector from opening ODK Web Forms if Form is in the closing state
  • Dialog shown for Web Forms loses some bottom margin