Thanks for the response everyone.
@yanokwa, I had already done this and knew about resetting the form to send again. It works alright with this method. However, this is painful to teach to field workers, who expect significantly straight forward working instructions from us with less complications. That's why I was expecting to avoid your mentioned method and looking for alternates and/or control of it via settings.
@LN: I would go for some variant of option 2. Here is my extended idea:
- Server settings in COLLECT should list 3 options: Data only (Wifi or Cellular), SMS only, Both SMS and data (where SMS is sent as soon as form is finalized, while data is sent when phone finds a data connection).
- Working should be like this: Option 1 and 2 are simple. For option 3, there should be 2 queues, 1 is SENT via SMS, and second SENT via DATA. As soon as the form is finalized, the form get queued into both queues. SMS should be sent immediately and the form should be released from this queue. But form should remain in data queue, unless it is sent via data and cleared afterwards.
2 safety measures are needed.
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First, SMS should send some submission identifier alongwith data (kind of like uuid in aggregate). This is needed because if I receive data from SMS and enter it manually into aggregate, then the absence of identifier will create a duplicate entry of the same data when it would come via data connection. I know uuid is created by aggregate when the instance is received, but Collect would have to do some smaller identifier too for channel synchronization.
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Second, SMS should somehow include which question numbers are missing from SMS data (like Q5 if it has image, Q7 if it has audio/video, etc). I know SMS has less space and every single text character is precious, but this is needed on the client side to know if the form submission is complete or not. I will give you an example: If there is an image question but the user does not select an image, then his submission is already complete on submission via SMS. However, I will only know of his opting out of image question when the data submission comes in. This is slightly down-the-road evolution step, but just wanted to share with you from the end-user point of view.
By the way, I have worked on SMS technologies for over a decade (hence my enthusiasm for it!), so I would be happy to help in any design steps for fine-tuning SMS channel (like above) if you require.
Many thanks to all,
Saad