Thanks again, @freedim.
We’ve found some time to investigate this, and with any luck, it’s we can make a simple change to the way KoBo handles authentication from ODK Briefcase—and then that will allow new versions of Briefcase to retrieve encrypted submissions. I certainly do appreciate your dedication to follow through on this. If another obstacle appears it would indeed be very helpful to have someone git bisect
the ODK Briefcase code (this is a method of narrowing down a set of changes by half over and over again until the likely culprit is identified), but please don’t spend your time learning about Git and Java development just yet. If you have a software developer friend with free time (laughable, I know) who might like to do some investigation later should we hit a roadblock—and hopefully we won’t—I’d be eager to collaborate.
Yes, it would be helpful for us to document this somewhere. Just quickly:
- ODK, or “Open Data Kit”, in their own words “began with a vision to make open-source mobile data collection software for resource-limited settings. Over the last 13 years, the project has produced two tool suites, ODK and ODK-X, that have helped make the world a better place” (https://opendatakit.org/). ODK-X is effectively an entirely different tool suite, so let’s not worry about it here.
- ODK is a collaborative project that maintains both standards (like OpenRosa and a subset of the W3C XML XForms standard) and software (like JavaRosa, ODK Collect, ODK Aggregate, ODK Briefcase, and—relatively recently—ODK Central).
- ODK previously focused on self-hosted software but now provides a commercial (paid) hosting service for ODK Central.
- XLSForm began as a more user-friendly way to create forms (via spreadsheets) than writing XML directly. XLSForm (and it’s Python reference implementation, pyxform) are now maintained by ODK as well as other stakeholders as described in the “History” section of XLSForm.org.
- KoBoToolbox (since 2014) is both an open-source software package for designing, sharing, deploying, analyzing, and reporting data-collection projects as well as that same software running as a hosted service, free-of-charge to humanitarian users. KoBoToolbox is based on the XLSForm and ODK standards and certainly endeavors to keep up with them! KoBoToolbox leadership participates in the ODK Technical Advisory Board and is an XLSForm stakeholder. The KoBoToolbox graphical form builder creates XLSForm, which then is transformed into XML XForm by pyxform for consumption by other tools in the ODK ecosystem.
- Enketo is an open-source tool developed by Enketo LLC to serve a similar purpose as the Android-exclusive ODK Collect, that is, to collect submissions, but to do so on any platform with a decent HTML5 browser. It uses the same ODK standards but is not concerned with XLSForm, because by the time a form reaches Enketo, it has already been transformed into XML XForm.