Suggested improvements to ODK Central

Hi there!

I just started to use ODK Central and I am really impressed by it. However, in my opinion, there are a couple of things that could be improved:

1.) It is not possible to delete records in ODK Central. This is necessary for data entries with errors or if someone enters "training data". It is not really feasible to do that on the DB level - the data manager needs to remember which entries have to be deleted or one needs an additional form/paper to write down these data entries.

2.) The filter options for submission data should be more sophisticated. It would be very beneficial if one could filter/sort by every single column. I am aware that this is possible on DB level, however, it would help a lot to have the possibility of doing it directly in ODK Central.

Is there any chance that these points are improved in a next version? Is there a timeline for these functions?

Greetings, Tobi

Hi @Tobias_Suter, and welcome to the ODK forum! When you have a chance, I'd encourage you to introduce yourself here. Doing so helps build community!

We actually just had a related discussion at What’s coming in Central over the next few years. I think you may be interested in that thread in general, and scroll down for discussion about deleting submissions. To summarize, deleting submissions is something we expect to implement in ODK Central eventually, but there is no timeline yet. The upcoming version v1.2 will introduce different but related functionality to review a submission, including the ability to mark a submission as rejected.

I'll also note that when you publish a form draft, the test submissions for the draft are deleted.

Currently, it is possible to filter by submission date and by submitter. In v1.2, it will also be possible to filter by Review State. In general, our intention is for submissions to be filterable by submission metadata. However, we do not currently plan to add the ability to filter on any form field. See this post for more on our thinking around ODK Central and data analysis.

You mentioned directly querying the database a couple of times, so I also wanted to mention that we do not make guarantees around the database schema, which may change at any time. The only official way to interact with the database is over the API.

Hope this helps!

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