Questions about ODK Central submission downloads: csv, xml, and audit

[Matthew_White]

Hi @jpringle!

@jpringle

It looks like the download options from the web interface and from the API are for the aggregated CSV file only, and not the original, individual XML submissions. Is that right?

You can also download all submissions as JSON via the OData endpoint, but there's no endpoint to download all submissions as XML. However, it should be possible to use ODK Briefcase with ODK Central to download the XML. It's also possible to use the API to download an individual submission's XML. It'd be great to learn more about how you're using the data and why it'd be useful to download all submissions as XML rather than CSV or JSON.

@jpringle

I get a folder in the zip called "media". In that folder, there is only one audit.csv file. Is that because all audit.csv files are named the same, so the software only keeps one of them (possibly at random) due to name collisions?

Exactly. All the audit.csv files are in there, and in theory, the .zip software could offer a way to extract them all. (That said, I don't actually know of any .zip software that does so.)

@jpringle

If the submissions had photos and the filenames were the timestamp of the photo, then there wouldn't be name collisions (with very high probability) and all pictures would be in the "media" folder, is that right?

Yes, that should be right!

@jpringle

Consider the combined audit file (that is just one CSV) in the zip from downloading all submissions. Is it just all audit.csv files concatenated one after another in some particular order?

@jpringle

In the combined audit.csv, I do not know which audit is for which submission.

The combined audit.csv should contain all the records that the individual audit.csv files do, and the intention is for the combined audit.csv to match the combined file that Briefcase exports. However, currently as of v1.1, there's a bug whereby the combined file doesn't have an instance ID column (see this topic).