Option to pin forms to the front page of ODK Collect

Ideas
1

1. What is the general goal of the feature?
Option to choose some blank forms and pin them to the front page for easy access. (May be up to 3 forms). The goal is to save time and increase efficiency.

2. What are some example use cases for this feature?
Some of our collection projects involve filling up the same form quickly one after the other. Right now the process is:

  1. Click on Fill Blank Form
  2. Scroll through the list of forms (takes some time, especially if there are several forms)
  3. Open the form and start filling
  4. After submission, ODK Collect returns to the front page.
  5. Repeat from Step 1

Proposed feature:

  • There would be a pin icon next to each form in the "Get blank form" page.
  • User can toggle up to 3 pins to show up on the homepage, so that only steps 3 and 4 are followed.

3. What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?

  • I can provide mockups for the proposed interface.
  • I may also be able to allocate one of our junior developers to support this task, especially if he can be provided some guidance with the codebase.
2

Hi @amalm

Have you heard about shortcuts: https://docs.getodk.org/collect-shortcut/
wouldn't that be a solution for your forblem?

3

Good suggestion, but most of the devices provided to the staff are locked and they will not be able to do this.

4

Can you please describe what all the forms represent? Do they really need to be on the devices at the same time or could you only serve a subset of forms from the server? If for some reason you do need all of those forms available offline, one option when the next version of Collect is released is configuring several projects that each download a subset of the forms. Those could all be configured to use the same credentials if need be.

5
  • Depending on the day of the week or any other planning done by the supervisor, different enumerators do different activities. So there are forms for each of them.
  • We use the "match server exactly" option, because many of the enumerators are not highly skilled so they may make mistakes if they download the forms themselves.

Yes I saw that thread as well and have voiced my comments there. It seems like that is meant to handle several project sets, each from a different server. While our use case has all the forms on a single server.