New feature: archive forms now affects relevant cases

[Cory Zue]

Hi users,

We just wanted to make a quick announcement of a new feature that we think will be useful to many of you. We have been receiving a growing number of requests to help people clean up their case data, for example by reopening cases that were accidentally closed, or by removing forms that were accidentally submitted against a case.

This is now possible to do this directly on CommCare HQ. In order to use this feature you have to first find the problematic form (either in the Submit History or the Case List reports). When viewing the form, click the "Archive this Form" button. This will cause the form to disappear, and will reverse any changes that the form caused in the case history*. A few special cases of this where it is has more uses:

- if the form closed the case, it will cause the case to be reopened.
- if the form was the only form submitted to the case (i.e. it registered/opened a new case), it will cause the case to be deleted
- if the form created  or updated multiple cases, the main case and all subcases will be affected

You can undo this operation at any time. Go to the "Raw Forms, Errors & Duplicates" report, filter by "Archived Forms". Click the "Restore this Form" button to unarchive the form and restore the changes this form made to the case.

Archived forms will not appear in form exports (unless you check "include duplicates" in your Form Export Filter).

Note: the changes will not appear on phones until the phones sync with the server.

Happy data cleaning!

The HQ devs

*EXCEPTION: If the form added a case property to the case, that property will not be changed. This essentially means that archiving the form will not remove case properties, it will only revert case properties back to their previous values, if they had one.

[Russell Gillen]

Hi, I have a few questions about the new changes:

Is there any push feed for notifying external systems that a particular form has been archived? For example, we receive a registration form and enroll that patient into a schedule and a series of IVR calls. Suppose that form is archived, is there any way for our system to become aware of this fact besides arbitrarily polling by the form ID? 

When a form is archived, does the xform id stay in the list of xforms submitted against the case (from the cases API)?

Thanks!

-Russell

[Cory Zue]

Hi Russell,

Great questions.

Is there any push feed for notifying external systems that a particular form has been archived? For example, we receive a registration form and enroll that patient into a schedule and a series of IVR calls. Suppose that form is archived, is there any way for our system to become aware of this fact besides arbitrarily polling by the form ID? 

Any affected cases will reappear in the case feeds. Forms do not currently reappear in the form feeds. I think we would need to add a new mechanism to support that if it was needed. If you think that's the case please emails me off thread and we can discuss your use case more.

When a form is archived, does the xform id stay in the list of xforms submitted against the case (from the cases API)?

No, it is removed.

Putting these two together, it will be hard for existing systems to easily answer "which form was archived", but as long as you have the relevant case info maybe that's ok?

thanks,

Cory

 

Thanks!

-Russell

On Thursday, August 1, 2013 6:40:05 PM UTC-4, Cory Zue wrote:

Hi users,

We just wanted to make a quick announcement of a new feature that we think will be useful to many of you. We have been receiving a growing number of requests to help people clean up their case data, for example by reopening cases that were accidentally closed, or by removing forms that were accidentally submitted against a case.

This is now possible to do this directly on CommCare HQ. In order to use this feature you have to first find the problematic form (either in the Submit History or the Case List reports). When viewing the form, click the "Archive this Form" button. This will cause the form to disappear, and will reverse any changes that the form caused in the case history*. A few special cases of this where it is has more uses:

- if the form closed the case, it will cause the case to be reopened.
- if the form was the only form submitted to the case (i.e. it registered/opened a new case), it will cause the case to be deleted
- if the form created  or updated multiple cases, the main case and all subcases will be affected

You can undo this operation at any time. Go to the "Raw Forms, Errors & Duplicates" report, filter by "Archived Forms". Click the "Restore this Form" button to unarchive the form and restore the changes this form made to the case.

Archived forms will not appear in form exports (unless you check "include duplicates" in your Form Export Filter).

Note: the changes will not appear on phones until the phones sync with the server.

Happy data cleaning!

The HQ devs

*EXCEPTION: If the form added a case property to the case, that property will not be changed. This essentially means that archiving the form will not remove case properties, it will only revert case properties back to their previous values, if they had one.

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