We wanted to provide more visibility into our roadmap and a rough timeline so you can offer feedback on both the features and our sequencing.
As always, we’ll be able to move faster if we have your help. If you or someone you know can fund this work or help with the development, email yanokwa@getodk.org.
Features we support now
- Projects to organize users, permissions, and forms
- User accounts with role-based permissioning
- Form upload and management
- With support for form version updates
- With drafts and testing on initial creation, and on version updates
- With form multimedia or data attachments
- Encrypted forms (self-supplied or project managed keys)
- True deletion of forms
- Submission upload and management
- Form filling from our mobile app or a web browser
- From permissions-managed known users or anonymous public links
- With submission multimedia or data attachments
- With an interactive table preview of submission data
- Support for reviewing, commenting on, and editing submissions after upload
- Connectable to data analysis and dashboard applications like Excel, Power BI, or R over OData
- Server-managed datasets for registration/follow-up workflows
- Integrated checklist-based help system
- Optional encrypted off-site data backups to Google Drive
- Clean and modern REST API for integration and extensibility
- High performance on low-cost hardware or cloud providers
- ODK Briefcase-compatible data output
- ODK Briefcase push/pull support
You can find out more about these features at https://docs.getodk.org/central-intro.
Short-term features
- Entity-based data collection for longitudinal workflows
- Delete all or some submissions
- Documenting running on more cloud providers
- We’ve provided documentation on Digital Ocean and AWS, but will add GCloud, and Azure.
- Download form attachments
Long-term features
- Sync the device to some centrally managed state
- We’re aiming for a single button push that will sync forms, submissions, and settings.
- Bulk upload-download user email address and permissions
- Improved install and upgrades to reduce dependence on command line
- JSON-based webhook similar to Aggregate's JSON publisher
- We have an OData feed
- You can push/pull/export with Briefcase
- De-prioritized until we have explicit demand for it
Features we’ll likely never add
- Parsing submissions into database tables
- Support for arbitrary schemas is a hard problem that introduces a lot of complexity (see Aggregate’s codebase).
- Visualizing data as pie or bar chart or map
- We believe this functionality should be pushed to external services through OData
- Arbitrary database support (e.g., MySQL, SQLServer)
- We believe PostgreSQL is the best database for our workload.
- List of previously exported submissions
- This shouldn’t be necessary since you can regenerate exports quickly
- Toggling display of submission metadata
- We will always show you all the relevant data.
- Export to KML or some other format
- We do not support KML, but GeoJSON is supported through Briefcase.
- If there is a wildly popular export that users want, we’ll consider it, but we’d rather not add to our maintenance burden.
- Publishing to Google Sheets or some other web service
- The webhook should allow you to connect to other services that can then forward data on to Google Sheets.
- If there is a wildly popular publisher that users want, we’ll consider it, but we’d rather not add to our maintenance burden.
- Anonymous retrieval of images, audio, video for visualization
- We expect downstream visualization tools to be able to securely auth against the server
- Manually upload submission data
- We believe this is a rare use-case and Briefcase supports it well.
- Support of the Briefcase-Aggregate API
- We believe the extensive RESTful API is better.
- Running on Google App Engine
- We value portability over the benefits of a platform as a service. You will be able to use Google Cloud, just not Google App Engine.
- A non-Docker install
- We use standard components, so it’s possible to set up Central outside of Docker. We don’t recommend it because we don’t have the resources to support non-Docker installs.
Some considerations to be aware of
If you use App Engine, there’s currently no way to redirect traffic from an appspot domain to another domain. You'll need a plan for changing the server URLs on your devices. If you use your own domain (e.g., with the Aggregate v2.0 or later), that domain can be used with Central.
Our expectation is that most users will keep using Aggregate for ongoing campaigns and will start new campaigns with Central. That is they won’t migrate their data. If migration is needed, Briefcase can migrate blank forms and submissions from Aggregate to Central. Publishers, users, filters, etc will not be moved.
This timeline is not set in stone! We’ll continue to update this post and the timelines as we get new information, so please watch this topic to get updates.
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