Searching Through Submissions

Support
1

Hello everyone!

Does anyone have advice or a good workflow for searching for individual submissions? We have users who need to review and make edits to individual submissions to a form with +100k submissions and we are struggling to find a workflow that is more efficient than using the existing filters of submitter and submission time then ctrl+f.

I wanted to make sure I am not ignoring some existing functionality before posting in the Ideas section.

Thank you!

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2

Absolutely, there's a super simple, no-coding way to do this right in Excel. Here's how you can set it up:

  • First, download your submission data as a .csv file, save it as .xlsx.
  • In that file, you'll find a field named KEY - we'll use that.
  • Now, add two new columns next to the KEY field (or wherever you prefer).

For the first column, name it something like "link", and use this formula (just replace [MY_ODK_DOMAIN], [PROJECT_ID], [FORM_ID] and [CELL WITH CORRESPONDING "KEY"] with your actual values):

="https://[MY_ODK_DOMAIN]/#/projects/[PROJECT_ID]/forms/[FORM_ID]/submissions/" & SUBSTITUTE([CELL - CORRESPONDING "KEY"], ":", "%3A")

Then in the second column, call it "open_form" and add this formula to make it clickable (replace [CELL - CORRESPONDING "LINK"]):

=HYPERLINK([CELL - CORRESPONDING "LINK"], "Open Form")

Example:

image
image1753×190 37.7 KB

And that's it - We're done!

Benefits:

  • You can filter, sort, and analyze submissions super easily in Excel.
  • No more scrolling, Ctrl+F, or wrestling with ODK's inbuilt filters - just click "Open Form" and jump right into the one you need.
  • Takes less than 5 minutes to set up, and saves you way more in the long run.

Party! :partying_face:

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Thank you for your response! I suggested something similar in the short term for my users, but in the long-term, I think they want a way to make to search for submissions and make permanent edits to the records so that the live data connections to our server will reflect the any edits made. I think I will post submission search in the ideas section to see if there are any other users that may have the same issue. I may also build a small application to use the API to accomplish this task as well.

4

Entities Search (screenshot) will be v2025.2 which will be available in a few weeks.

We've now exploring what it'll take to add Submission Search to v2025.3 (ETA July). @mscholtens please do add it to Ideas so we can consider your needs in our planning.

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