I think it is a great idea to review this page as you said.
I had witnessed situations where collectors for more than one year had not been submitting forms to the server because they taught after clicking on mark as finalized, the form was sent to the server automatically and no one noticed that until review. Luckily for that situation, the finalized forms were still all in the phone.
The default configuration when configuring from Central QR code is to auto-send on finalization and that's generally what we recommend. We have not changed the default for other configurations for continuity but maybe that's something to consider. Would you be up for a conversation about finalization more broadly?
If you're not using Central, you have a few options to turn on auto-send:
Thanks @LN, I know of the autosend option which is great. But in our situation will not be a good idea as sometimes it can take a week to finalize a form while searching for missen information.
I think it will be more usefull to find a more insightful way to make the user know his form is finalized but not submitted and that he has to do it manually.
Sure, I can definitely find time for a conversation on finalisation.
I wanted data collector to finalized form as soon as the form was filled because:
There is constraint-check when finalized form. Despite there is within page constraint-check when navigate from page-to-page, but hierarchical navigation could actually bypass the check. Hence, to ensure near-time correction can be made, the form has to be finalized soon after completion.
If data collector wants to finalize it, check it otherwise save form for later use. The saved form shall be always editable.
Sometimes, data collector finalized form but edit it again. This approach is not encouraged as 'finalized' means no more editing. I do have the 'auto-send' turned on by default. Hence, during offline mode, the data collector might still be able to edit the finalized form before it is sent. To me, finalized form is a container that place the form which are ready to send when there is internet connectivity.
Should I consider finalizing form only when accessibility to internet connectivity is certain?
Sometimes, the connectivity is weak in the outdoor. It is worrisome when the finalized form stalled to send during connectivity is cut-off and not continuing to send after re-gain the internet connectivity. If there was no one do a check whether form was successfully sent, it will be too late to discover one day. I have reservation on the app whether it is robust to ensure all finalized form and its attachments could send completely without further intervention. What is the mechanism behind that enable it?
In my case, the instance name of form is set by the form definition. Data collector do not require to specify it.
Thanks for the feedback. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences, as this will help inform the next iteration of the designs!
I'm curious to hear more about point #3 and why the data collectors are editing once the form is finalized. Could you tell us why they are coming back and editing the form? Are they opening the form to save it or to make edits because they learnt something new?
We are having problems and I am looking back at this discussion.
Our enumerators click "Finalize" by error or because of habit, even if they are told the new information to only save as a draft. In fact, the supervisors still check out the data after it is collected and might modify it.
Would it be possible to edit the finalized forms as before, please? I guess that there are other cases similar to ours.
Thanks so much for sharing this feedback, and I'm sorry to hear the new form finalization flow is causing issues for you and your team.
The easiest way to avoid this issue would be to add a final question to be filled out by the supervisor. The question could be yes/no if the submission was reviewed or the reviewer's initials. The reviewer needs to open each submission anyway, so hopefully, that won't be too much additional work. In this case, it would be up to the supervisor to finalize.
I'm also curious to know what you think about this thread about bulk finalization for those with workflows in which new information may be identified at any time? We've also updated the docs about bulk finalization. Let us know what you think.
Thank you very much for your answer.
Adding a question can be problematic because the enumerators might answer it themselves, so we cannot rely on it.
I found in the bulk finalization discussion a possible solution by hiding the "finalize" button at the end of the form.
Then, the supervisor can check drafts as needed, then bulk finalize and send forms.
However, select and deselect drafts to finalize would be good than all or nothing because we might want to keep some drafts for later finalization, for example.
Again, thank you, it was very helpful, as always in the forum.
