Collecting data without logging in

[Matth]

Hello

We’re currently experiencing many issues while trying to send pre-filled form submissions for modifications.

Our process is the following

• We have a template form for all our project monitorings and the toggle for allowing anonymous submissions is ON

• Our MRV create one submission for each project through your API

• We then send an email to our data collectors who are responsible for filling in the required data and submit the form update

But we are experiencing several issues :

• When trying to open the submission, we sometimes get an error message (loading error) and we often have it in read-only mode, even if it’s not open on another computer.

• When submitting the form update, we are having various error messages (cf screenshots below)

This is critical for us as we can’t launch our annual collection without solving these problems.

By the way, we’re using the Kobo EU server ( KoboToolbox ) after a successful migration from our old self-hosted instance.

Thanks by advance for your precious help.

I get this message when I’m not connected and trying to open a submission

If connected, I have access to the submission but sometimes it open in view mode

And sometimes it open in edit mode

And when submitting I’ve got this 403 error (if logged-in)

And this error (if not logged in)

[Kal_Lam]

@Matth, this post discussed previously should give you a clue on how to achieve this:

How to make an api request for editing a submitted instance

I could be overlooking something, but I don’t think we have a great way to do this. A quick and dirty way to prompt for credentials and then redirect to another KoBo endpoint is to use https://kobo.humanitarianresponse.info/accounts/login/?next=[destination], where [destination] in your case would be /api/v2/assets/akj5HssCp67JRVMV9PqVp6/data/119085042/edit/?return_url=false: https://kobo.humanitarianresponse.info/accounts/login/?next=/api/v2/assets/akj5HssCp67JRVMV9PqVp6/data/119085042/edit/?…

[Matth]

Thanks @Kal_Lam but the issue is not editing a submission through API (this we achieve without issue); it’s providing a submission edition link to an unregistered user…

If you got any other clue, or advice please let me know.

[Xiphware]

@Matth

submission edit(ion)[sic] link to an unregistered user

This is not possible; irrespective of whether the form may permit anonymous submissions or not, to be able to edit existing submissions via Enketo you must be authenticated; ie logged into an account on the same server. In addition, the project must have been shared with your account, or you are already the project owner.

Otherwise you will get the loading error that you are seeing if you try to open the edit url (as obtained via the API) whilst you are unauthenticated (or the form hasn’t been shared with you):

If you are authenticated, and the form has been shared with you with suitable permissions, then you should be able to open the edit URL, change the existing form data and resubmit [I re-tested this myself successfully just now]. Obviously, however, the edit URL is quite time-sensitive, so it they wait too long before using it, you may have to regenerate a new edit URL to share with them (they’ll see a “Loading Error … Record not present. It may have expired.” popup)

[Matth]

Thanks @Xiphware for your feedback. That’s what I was fearing…

I’ll have to try a whole other approach like sending form links with parameters to pre-fill some fields and a web-hook to catch submissions and link them back to our MRV.

Too bad I didn’t ask here before…