I work on a project that involves massive amounts of data from various sources, but our main source is CommCare. I want to transfer data from another platform to CommCare. Can you help me with this? I'm very concerned about the data's archieve and security.
Hi @Bayan
There are various ways to transfer data from another platform to CommCare. The method you choose will depend on the nature of the data, how often you want to transfer the data, and the capabilities of the other platform.
The nature of the data
Is the data about identifiable things, like people or items or places? Then you would probably want to store that data in CommCare as cases.
Or is the data about events, or individual data points that one could think of as survey data? Then you would probably want to store them as form question values.
Frequency
If you want to transfer the data just once, or infrequently like, maybe annually or perhaps even monthly, and if the data can fit in an Excel spreadsheet, then I would recommend using a Case Import (Data > Import Cases from Excel). This is your simplest (cheapest in terms of effort?) option.
If you want to transfer the data more frequently, things get complicated quickly.
CommCare HQ offers a range of APIs. You can find API documentation for programmers here.
CommCare also offers integration via Zapier. Zapier is great at moving data between CommCare and a range of different sources and destinations. You can find instructions here.
Capabilities of the other platform
Your final set of options will be determined by how you can get data out of the other platform; whether it allows you to export as Excel or CSV; whether it allows you to forward data to a remote API, or automatically exported somewhere that Zapier has access to, like Google Sheets; whether it offers APIs that can be polled; etc.
I hope I have given you some options to think about, and places to find more information.
Thanks,
Norman