Exporting form submissions -- Unrecognized form urls

Users
1

Hello- I'm trying to export form submissions to Excel, but I'm seeing other
form urls that I don't recognize. Where are these coming from? What does
it mean when it says the form submissions could belong to another form?
See attached images.

Thanks!
Carolyn

CommCare submissions.JPG1279×582 71.1 KB

CommCare submissions(2).JPG1161×559 72.8 KB

2

Hi Carolyn,

Hello- I'm trying to export form submissions to Excel, but I'm seeing
other form urls that I don't recognize. Where are these coming from? What
does it mean when it says the form submissions could belong to another
form? See attached images.

There are a few ways this can happen, but it may be more helpful to explain
what's going on behind the scenes. In CommCare HQ each of your forms is
tagged with a unique id called a namespace or xmlns (which are the urls you
see on that page). CommCare HQ knows the id of all the forms in your
application, and uses it to match submissions made with the same ID to the
right form in your application. If it gets a form with an id it doesn't
recognize it is unable to match it, and the forms just show up with the
urls like you see.

Some of these are system forms, (for example the device reports), but the
overwhelming majority look like real forms, which is confusing, because
once you create a form on HQ it should remember the ID for all time
whenever you edit it. Are you doing anything complicated to edit your
application? Examples of ways this could come up are:

  1. If you were downloading the raw forms, editing them in another tool,
    then re-uploading them.
  2. If you deleted an application that had lots of data submitted to it.
  3. If you deleted a form, then recreated it on HQ.
  4. If you manually changed the IDs in the form over time.

Are any of these workflows that you're using?

thanks,
Cory

··· On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 5:35 AM, Carolyn Gulas wrote:

Thanks!
Carolyn

3

yes, as a matter of fact, we edit all of our forms in Excel, using formhub
to convert to xml, which we then upload to CommCare. I don't actually use
the CommCare forms editor. I'm assuming then, that each time I upload a
new xml form, the form id changes? Is there anyway for this not to happen,
since this has always been the way we edit our forms?

··· On Monday, January 21, 2013 4:05:51 PM UTC+5:30, Carolyn Gulas wrote: > > Hello- I'm trying to export form submissions to Excel, but I'm seeing > other form urls that I don't recognize. Where are these coming from? What > does it mean when it says the form submissions could belong to another > form? See attached images. > > Thanks! > Carolyn >
4

yes, as a matter of fact, we edit all of our forms in Excel, using formhub
to convert to xml, which we then upload to CommCare. I don't actually use
the CommCare forms editor. I'm assuming then, that each time I upload a
new xml form, the form id changes? Is there anyway for this not to happen,
since this has always been the way we edit our forms?

I can't think of a great short term workaround. You could file a
bug/feature request with formhub and ask them to not change the xmlns when
you make an edit (though they may be doing this by design for some other
reason). You could try manually setting the xmlns after you make an edit
but before you upload it (though this will be error prone). We could also
one day support having a mode where HQ manages the form IDs for you,
instead of keeping them in the forms themselves, though people continually
editing their forms in other tools is not a common workflow so this may
fall pretty far down on our roadmap.

Cory

··· On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Carolyn Gulas wrote: