After 100s of tests and trials, I managed to link two projects but now the data I can return in the child project works only for the first entry. Any following entries don’t appear or sync regardless of anything I do. I tried signing out and in again, changing the browser or the internet network, creating new projects, waiting for over 5 hours, turning off and on the laptop,etc, but it doesn’t work with me on my account.
I asked a friend to try and they worked with him. The child form give a notification that there is a newer version and he refreshes and gets the news data. This doesn’t appear with me.
The other point is calculation of the age and gender breakdown from the parent to the child project. After a lot of trials, coalesce worked but it doesn’t give the correct values.
Welcome to the community, @Anhar! Have your also tried with the sample XLSForm shared through our support article?
I assume you are having issues due to the syntax issues. Maybe try it with our sample XLSForm shared through the support article to see if the issue is the same at your end. Generally it should take only 5 minutes to sync the submissions between the server and the device through which you are collecting your data.
Hello, thank you for your response. Yes, I have read the article and checked the sample forms.
I have revised the syntax and all works well. I have deployed the forms and worked on connecting them through a different account owned by a colleague in Slovakia. He was able to fill out the forms successfully, and syncing took him less than 2 minutes. However, my account doesn’t sync all the time. Yesterday, I did a couple of entries, and they took 5 hours to sync. I tried again with another entry at night, but it is still not synced until now. I have tried 4 different internet connections here in Kyiv, but it didn’t sync.
We have urgent assessments and data collection and would appreciate your advice. Is it a bug with my account? Is it possible that I share my username for the KOBO team to check if it’s an account issue/ bug?
So, after a lot of testing, I found out that it gets slower in syncing if any edit was made to the entries that were submitted in the parent project. I mean that the child project doesn’t refresh in 5 minutes if there were edits or new entries in the parent project. It takes much longer. It is not a connection issue because 2 other cloned projects work well because there were no edits.
I had to delete the project and redeploy for it to work.
Another error was failure to upload an adminslan.csv although I was using a location.csv in the coding and syntax. I had to delete the project and reupload for it to work.
@Kal_Lam, beside taking too much time to sync or not sync at all, the return values of multiple select work sometimes and other times it doesn’t although it’s the same form and same projects.
The options in that are not returned in the picture below worked well for previous entries.
@Anhar I can confirm the feature works as intended – data from the parent form can be pulled into the child form. It’s also possible to edit the parent form data and the change will be reflected in the child form.
Keep in mind that the parent form data is cached for 5 minutes. So if you make an edit you may need to wait up to 5 minutes to see it reflected in the child form. Specifically, it’s 5 minutes since the last time you opened/refreshed the child form.
If you haven’t opened/refreshed the child form in the last 5 minutes the edit (or new submission) to the parent form is reflected immediately.
@Anhar I understand the problem is that even after new data is entered into the parent form, you do not see the new data on your end after five minutes and that I can take several hours. From what I understand you do always see the updated data but that the delay is very long. Is that correct?
In order for us to be able to help we need more specific details.
Can you please send specific step by step actions that you take to reproduce the issue. Please be as exact as possible in each step.
How are you entering the new data in the parent form and confirming that it was received in kobo.iom.int?
How are you then updating your child form to pull the new data?
Do you use Enketo or Collect? If you use Enketo, do you use the offline or the online-only link?
The issue has to two parts. The syntax is revised and it’s confirmed that it’s working by a colleague who tried to deploy in his account. The steps I do are as follows:
I deploy the parent form. Enable the connecting project function. Select the fields that I want to return to the child form.
Deploy the child form. Select the parent form that I want to return data from. Change the name to “main_project” because this is what I used when I was coding. Then select the fields that I want to return values to.
I use the enketo, online-offline link. Fill out the parent form. Submit. Check the data is uploaded in the Data section of the project.
Open the child form after 5 minutes or more. Fill it out. Sometimes, the syncing works very well. Other times, The issues I get are the following:
1- Sometimes no data syncs between the two forms at all.
2- 90% of the data syncs only. One of the select-multiple questions doesn’t return any values or data while another select-multiple question return value well.
3- If I delete the projects, redeploy, it could work.
4- If I redeploy the projects (first parent and second child) and follow the connecting projects steps, it could work.
If the syntax is fine, functionality is fine, could it be an issue/ bug with my account?
@Anhar, could you kindly share your XLSForms (both parent and child forms) so I can check them out with my IOM account? Thank you once again for sharing the entire details. I will try to follow your details to see what happens at my end.
@Kal_Lam . I tried but it’s saying “New users cannot upload attachments”. My colleague said she’ll share them with you. Or is there another way to share with you?
Didn’t have issues with the parent project as well as the child project. FYI please also be informed that I made 1 entry for the parent project and made a subsequent entry for the child project (after 5 minutes). Then edited the submission from the parent project and then immediately made another entry for the child project (without waiting for any time) and had no affect. The dynamic data attachment had no issues.
@Anhar. as a quick check maybe you could upload the project as a new dummy project (for testing) in your account and then check out if you are able to do link the projects smoothly.
