I want to highlight a few new features in CommCare HQ.
Improved detail screen configuration. As many of you may have noticed, a
couple weeks ago we changed the detail screen configuration tool. This is
where you can design how your case lists and referral lists will look. Due
to poor internet in many areas, we decided it was best to let you make all
the changes you wanted before saving, thus avoiding the tediously slow page
reloads. One big difference in the new interface is that you can configure
the short view (i.e. the case list) and the long view (i.e. full screen for
one patient) in a single table, thus cutting out redundancy. You'll notice
that the checkboxes at the left; you can use these to decide whether to put
a property on the short view, the long view, or both. We hope you like the
new layout!
Search Only format in case list. We've heard from a number of people
that when selecting a patient from the case list, it would be nice for there
to be searchable fields that don't actually show up in the table. This is
now possible: just add a property to your case or referral details and
choose the "Search Only" format.
Date ranges on more reports. We went through and added support for date
ranges on a number of the reports. For example, Submissions by Form now
allows you to choose any date range you want instead of just the last 7
days.
Custom user registrations. Sometimes you want to collect more
information from your CHWs than just their username and password. For
example, you may want to know what district they work in. You can now go
enter whatever data you choose by using our Custom User Registration
feature. To enable, in the application's Advanced Settings, select Use
Custom User Registrations: Use. Then on the bar at the right, choose User
Registration. This feature is still rough around the edges and is most
suitable for advanced users. You cannot use the old form designer to edit
this. Instead you may start with the default that HQ provides, download the
form, make any additions you want and re-upload it. You must also refer to https://bitbucket.org/commcare/commcare/wiki/CommCareProfile to make sure
your form prepares the data correctly.
Export cases, referrals, and users. This new data export feature gives
you access to your entire patient list (cases), all their referrals, and the
list of all your CHWs (users) with their meta data. To use this feature
select the report called Export cases, referrals, and users.
Thanks for all your tireless work, and we hope these features can help you
continue to improve upon these fantastic deployments!
Cheers,
Danny
p.s. Don't forget to check out two recently announced features:
Custom Exports. When doing a data export, you can now configure a custom
export that includes only certain fields that you're most interested in.
Multimedia File Checker. This tool looks into your forms to give you a
complete list of multimedia files (images, audio, etc) that you should have
in order for your multimedia deployment to work. It also lets you download a
python script that you can use to check your actual multimedia directory
against this list and alert you of any missing or extra files. This tool can
be found the front page of your app under "Multimedia (beta)"
Re: Search Only format in case list. We've heard from a number of people
that when selecting a patient from the case list, it would be nice for
there to be searchable fields that don't actually show up in the table.
This is now possible: just add a property to your case or referral details
and choose the "Search Only" format
I'm trying to use the "Search" functionality, but cannot seem to get it
working. In my scenario, I have a case property called 'community_name'
that I would like to be able to search by. I've added this property to the
CCHQ case details twice: once with 'long' selected and using the 'Plain'
format; and once with neither 'short' nor 'long' selected and using the 'Search
only' format. While it looks like both of these were saved initially,
later looks like the second one may have disappeared. Should I be
attempting to include the same property twice (ie. once to include in the
detailed case information and once with a 'Search' format), or should I be
handling this in a different way?
Thanks for your probing questions. The desired effect is that you should be
able to select Search Only for both long and short, and that it would be
invisible in short but indistinguishable from Plain in long. It looks like
the code worked imperfectly, but I've made changes and this should be
working fine now. Let me know if you have any more problems or questions.
Cheers,
Danny
···
2011/11/16 Ray Brunsting
Hi Danny,
Re: Search Only format in case list. We've heard from a number of people
that when selecting a patient from the case list, it would be nice for
there to be searchable fields that don't actually show up in the table.
This is now possible: just add a property to your case or referral details
and choose the "Search Only" format
I'm trying to use the "Search" functionality, but cannot seem to get it
working. In my scenario, I have a case property called 'community_name'
that I would like to be able to search by. I've added this property to the
CCHQ case details twice: once with 'long' selected and using the 'Plain'
format; and once with neither 'short' nor 'long' selected and using the 'Search
only' format. While it looks like both of these were saved initially,
later looks like the second one may have disappeared. Should I be
attempting to include the same property twice (ie. once to include in the
detailed case information and once with a 'Search' format), or should I be
handling this in a different way?
Thanks. Search is now working as expected -- both with CC-J2ME and CC-ODK.
One suggestion for future consideration: allow the user to enable/disable
search for all (text?) fields.
Use case: the CHWs we work with cover several communities, and we are
hoping to have them use the search field to list all patients in the
community they are visiting. While they can do this now, they would end
up listing patients from other communities that happen to have a name
similar to the community name (e.g. "Boston" is both the name of a fine
city, and was used as a baby name by 118/1,000,000 US babies in 2009).
Also, separating enable/disable search configuration from the format
selection may be less confusing for some users (like me!).
Cheers, Ray
···
On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Daniel Roberts wrote:
Hi Ray,
Thanks for your probing questions. The desired effect is that you should
be able to select Search Only for both long and short, and that it would be
invisible in short but indistinguishable from Plain in long. It looks like
the code worked imperfectly, but I've made changes and this should be
working fine now. Let me know if you have any more problems or questions.
Re: Search Only format in case list. We've heard from a number of
people that when selecting a patient from the case list, it would be nice
for there to be searchable fields that don't actually show up in the table.
This is now possible: just add a property to your case or referral details
and choose the "Search Only" format
I'm trying to use the "Search" functionality, but cannot seem to get it
working. In my scenario, I have a case property called 'community_name'
that I would like to be able to search by. I've added this property to the
CCHQ case details twice: once with 'long' selected and using the 'Plain'
format; and once with neither 'short' nor 'long' selected and using the ' Search only' format. While it looks like both of these were saved
initially, later looks like the second one may have disappeared. Should I
be attempting to include the same property twice (ie. once to include in
the detailed case information and once with a 'Search' format), or should I
be handling this in a different way?