When we archive our form, its case should pop back to life. But what about in this situation?

[Eric Stephan]

Hello all... 

We have a form called A1, and when it is completed, it often creates a child case called referral. 

... Then, we have a form called C1 that is a follow-up form, that opens up those "referral" cases, and when that C1 form is completed, it closes the "referral" case.

But also, we have an "automatic case closing rule" that is set to close "referral" cases that have not been modified in 30 days.   (In other words, if nobody does a "C1" form to close that referral case for 30 days, it will simply close itself.)

Here is my question, which has to do when we use the archive command to archive a form.

• Let's pretend that 6 months ago, someone filled out an A1 form, and it created the "referral" child case, and someone did indeed fill out a C1 form, which nicely closed that "referral" case. 
  
• Now, it is 6 months later, and we are doing some correcting of data, so we archive that C1 form. Of course, the result of archiving that C1 form is that the case that it had automatically closed should spring back alive and be an open case again.
• BUT, notice that that auto case closing rule for the "referral" case type was set to 30 days. Would that case closing rule (or anything else) cause this 6-month-ago old case to NOT spring back to life if we go to archive the C1 form that had originally closed that case?

Giant thanks for your help, I know this is a tangled question.

Eric

[Cory Zue]

Hi Eric,

You really know how to push the bounds of what you can do with CommCare! :)

I'm not sure the exact answer to your question, however an auto-case-closing rule, behind the scenes, will just submit a "system" form to close the case. Those "system" forms can be archived just like normal forms. So I think if the case didn't reopen you could also archive the "auto-close" form and then it would.

One caveat - it could be possible that once you get in this state the auto-close rule would keep matching the newly opened case (which might have an old last modification date) and so those rules might keep closing the case on you! If this happened I believe you could work around it by just submitting any update to the case.

Cory

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "commcare-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to commcare-users+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Simon Kelly]

The other option for preventing the case close rule from re-closing the case would be to add another filter to the rule that checks for a case property with a specific value e.g. auto_close = False.

Obviously a case with that set would never get closed by the auto-close rule but if you're doing manual cleanup that may be an OK situation.

I think the best course of action is to examine the specific case and see if the reason it's not showing up is that the auto-case close rule is re-closing it or if there's something else going on.

Simon Kelly

Director of Server Engineer | Dimagi

[Eric Stephan]

Thanks much to both of you!! I will give it a try -- 

Eric