We are currently collecting large scale data through kobo-collect. In our survey we are listing around 120 Households in a single form. Each household information contains 4 repeat group where one field contains option to take photos. On average we are have 3-50 photos in one listing form.
Some enumerators are facing a very unique problem.
when they are inputting information of 80/90 households sometimes upon clicking the photo button their kobo crashes and take them to a new form. Additionally 2/3 drafts form automatically created in their device. Later, when they reopens a form, they are shown to recover that form. Its manageable.
The worrying one is for some enumerators they are failing to send forms through the server. We checked several times and confirmed that their forms and server settings are all correct. But still they are having this message: Failed to Upload; please make sure form is configured to accept submissions on the server. Other enumerators can regularly send but some can’t. We facing this issues very frequently.
Welcome back to the community, @firony! Please be aware that the KoboToolbox server has specific limits for media attachments: each question can accommodate a maximum of 10 MB, while a single submission can contain up to 100 MB of total media attachments. Attachments exceeding these limits will not be accepted by the server. We encourage you to verify that your submission adheres to these thresholds to ensure successful submission to the server.
So, that’s why the form is showing that error message, right? Or do I need to change anything else?
I will suggest my enumerators to set the picture to small(640 px) to mitigate this issue. Will it be helpful? And how can i get those data that are having errors.
I can assure you that the image size is set to Very Small (640 px). Can I retrieve those data that are freezed. As they are already been finalized there’s no way to edit.
Please make sure these photo questions have a max-pixels specified. In your case, with so many pictures, you may need to drop this down to 640 or even 480.
sometimes upon clicking the photo button their kobo crashes
There aren’t any open issues about this that I’m aware of. However, again, with so many pictures - and depending on the specific phone device you happen to be using - you may be hitting physical internal storage limits on the device itself such that its getting OOM (Out-Of-Memory) errors.
Can I retrieve those data that are freezed.
Yes. If you have finalized forms on a device but you cannot submit them for some reason, then you can pull them off and perhaps try to ‘submit’ them manually. It’s a bit laborious, but there are instructions here: Manually Uploading Submissions — KoboToolbox documentation
BTW, and not to state the obvious, but instead of filling in a single form for, potentially, so many households, have you considered reworking it to fill in one form per household? Unless all these households are somehow intimately related to each other - and therefore must remain closely associated by virtue of being recorded within the same submission - it is not immediately clear what the benefit is of having every one in single form.
Again, I assure you that the max pixel is set to 640 px (the Lowest possible).
We can’t submit 1 houshold per form. We are collecting around 800K household information. Around 120 households make one cluster from which we are providing a random list of household for interview. For this reason that one HH per form isn’t feasible.
Are you able to post your XLSForm here, to try and reproduce the error you are seeing.
Nothwithstanding above, there may be other approaches to this, such as having these household ‘clusters’ defined in an external CSV and assigning each data collector to a specific cluster. In-form logic can then ensure that they only see the household(s) that have been assigned to when collecting data (eg via a choice filter). Rather than having to fill in all 120 in one go.
we list around 120 Household information in one form per Enumeration area.
Each Household has 4 repeat group for four categories.
When the listing phase is complete, We provide a random sampling of specific number from the four categories. Then they are surveyed separately on other forms.
Now, our enumerators take pictures (one) for verifying the categories in the listing form (that contains around 120 HHs and 4 repeat groups in each HH).
The issue is, for some enumerators it showing that the form isn’t configured to accept sumbission on the server. We made sure that, their picture is max 640 px. We also look at thier instance folder on their device storage>andriod>data>org.koboc.collect and found that their image file is maximum 100kb. So, in total they should get just about 20-40 mb file per form.
@firony
Aside from the error you’re seeing, which we could help troubleshoot if we have access to your XLSForm, there’s something important to consider based on the setup you described:
Given this workflow, have you considered using Dynamic Data Attachments? or as @Xiphware suggested
It can really help with the kind of structure you’re trying to implement.
Finally how is your KoboCollect app configured? Would you mind sharing a screenshot of it?
