I spent hours editing a form after testing it. This involved creating several groups for questions, adding one or two questions and deleting one question. Unpredictably at a point during editing, if I try to preview the form, I will get an error message about an unknown language. Having tried to make and save my edits more than 5 times now, I know this message means that more than 75% of my form has been wiped. I verify this in the xls download. If I try to edit the form, I get an error message and I am never able to view or edit that form again:
This seems to be a horrific bug because I have cloned the last version of the form that worked to restart my edits, and it happens every time - not immediately - but after working through several sections.
To make matters worse, there seems to be a problem with version history. There should be a link that cascades the full history, but it is not there. I can’t find any previous versions of this form.
So I literally start from scratch with the same clone every time. Please please please help. This is time sensitive and I’ve been recreating this form for more than 12 hours now.
I spent hours editing a form after testing it. This involved creating several groups for questions, adding one or two questions and deleting one question. Unpredictably at a point during editing, if I try to preview the form, I will get an error message about an unknown language. Having tried to make and save my edits more than 5 times now, I know this message means that more than 75% of my form has been wiped. I verify this in the xls download. If I try to edit the form, I get an error message and I am never able to view or edit that form again:
This seems to be a horrific bug because I have cloned the last version of the form that worked to restart my edits, and it happens every time - not immediately - but after working through several sections.
To make matters worse, there seems to be a problem with version history. There should be a link that cascades the full history, but it is not there. I can’t find any previous versions of this form.
So I literally start from scratch with the same clone every time. Please please please help. This is time sensitive and I’ve been recreating this form for more than 12 hours now.
If you find you are ‘losing’ changes to a (large?) for you are building up in Kobo Formbuilder, then one thing you might consider is to periodically do a Download XLS, to save a ‘snapshot’ of the form in its current state to an XLS file. That way, in the worst case, if cloning the form, or adding/removing questions in Formbuilder, etc, corrupt things, then you can always restore your own previous XLS snapshot by performing a Replace form and re-uploading the form definition from your XLS file.
This doesnt address the issue of why your forms are getting corrupted - they shouldnt - but it may save you from having to start from scratch every time if goes wrong.
When you Download XLS you get a complete snapshot of your form definition, complete with any choices list [but not media attachments - you can copy those by DATA → Downloads → export Media Attachments (ZIP)]. You can then use this XLS to re-create a new Project from this form definition in your own account, or a new Project in somebody else’s account, or even on a different server (eg Global vs EU). The XLS file is basically a permanent record of your form at the point in time you did Download XLS.
Thank you! In the end, I started from the last uncorrupted version, downloaded and finished making all of the edits in XLS to avoid risking any more losses. It was unpredictable when the file would be corrupted so it no longer made any sense to work in form builder.
Thank you so much for trying to solve my problem. Ultimately, I ended up downloading the xls for last “non-corrupted” version I could find (from 12 hrs before!) and finishing all of the edits directly in the xls file. I am not a programmer, so I’m not even sure what a JSON is and I was under a lot of time pressure to finish that survey. If I find an opportunity in the future, I’ll see if I make sense outo f your fix and/or reproduce the event… it occurred very randomly every time I restarted the project as a clone - often it would let work without any problems at all for 20-30 minutes (during which I regularly checked the preview after editing each section) and then suddenly - for no apparent reason - the preview would stop working and I would get the first error message about an unknown language, followed by the longer error message and the form would no longer open.
