I’m experiencing an issue with collected signatures in my form, where the Question Type is set to Photo and the Appearance is Signature.
This question has been functioning correctly for a while, but I recently noticed a problem. Specifically:
When viewing the record, I see a message stating: “Could not find signature.”
When attempting to open the record in Edit mode, a warning appears: “File could not be loaded (leave unchanged if already submitted and you want to preserve it).”
This issue is preventing me from viewing or exporting the collected signatures.
Could you please assist me in identifying the cause and resolving this issue?
I am experiencing the same issue as well. In the submitted forms most responses have a successful signature that can be seen and downloaded, however it seems that it sometimes might not and show:
Could not find signature.
Any way we can address this?
Dear Kal,
I imagine you might request the same information as the previous submission. So here is the requested info:
username: projectdatacollect
Project name: Consent Form
server: eu.kobotoolbox.org
When the form is submitted, all data is filled properly and the signatures are there. When you go to view the signature, it’s not there. Please this is urgent, we use these forms to distribute cash and collect signatures as proof.
Greetings, I do not have direct experience of this issue, however from looking at past forum posts relating to signatures I see there are two aspects that may be relevant for the Kobo team to help troubleshoot:
a) what tool is used for data collection (Enketo web forms or Kobo Collect app)
b) whether the data is collected in offline mode or online mode
Thank you Nat for your input.
Indeed there seems to be same issues previously listed, however I havent read of a clear response to this issue. For my part, we collect on Enketo web forms and do so online only which is why this has been a little odd.
We are testing to see if allowing a few seconds from data input to submission will change anything in the grand scheme of things, however since this is related to consent form collection even the small number of ones that might get away are important.
In our case, we are using Enketo web forms. The project utilized an online-only link, for one-time use per respondent.
Moving forward, I will consider adding a question after the signature field in future forms. This adjustment is based on the recommendation that signatures may be lost if the time between adding the signature and clicking the submit button is too short. However, in the example shared by Isslam, the form collected the signature twice, yet the signature was still lost. This suggests that the issue may not be entirely related to timing.
Another potential factor worth investigating is whether this issue could be linked to the server being used.
We are experiencing the same issue here, just recently. Last year we used this same form with more than 600 submissions without any trouble. Today, our data looks like this:
Unfortunately not, but we’re currently investigating another report of this problem happening when using Enketo on iOS. What hardware (e.g. phone or tablet model), operating system, and browser are you using to collect submissions? Are you using Enketo with offline capability, or allowing single submissions only? The more detail you provide, the more likely we can identify the problem.
Your screenshot appears to contain full names of people and some kind of identification numbers, and so will be censored to remove this potentially sensitive information. This is a public forum: please be a diligent custodian of your response data.
More precisely, signatures had been successfully captured, saved and accessed in the past with this form. Just recently Enketo fails to save most of them.
@Kal_Lam
Dear KoboToolbox team and all,
I wanted to follow up to check if there have been any updates regarding this issue. Additionally, if anyone has any best practices or recommendations to help prevent this issue, I would greatly appreciate it.
I have an upcoming data collection project that will involve capturing signatures, and I’d like to ensure we can avoid this problem if a solution or workaround is available.
I’ve conducted additional testing and found that the issue with losing the signature appears to occur when the form includes an image question with the signature appearance and another question that allows file attachments.
For example, in my test form, I included both a signature field for drawing and a file upload option to allow users to upload an electronic signature instead. I noticed that when the file upload question is present, the signature drawing field stops functioning properly. However, when I changed the appearance of the file upload question to annotate, the issue was resolved, and both fields worked as expected.
Apologies, could you please share the schedule for these two items? I’ve been experiencing the same issue — I added “annotate” as the format, but the same difficulty persists.
I’d like to understand how you were able to resolve it just by using that appearance setting.
Please note that I’ve added my latest comment to support the KOBO team in tracking this issue. Based on initial testing, I observed that when a form includes a Question Type: Photo with Appearance: Signature alongside another question that allows users to upload an attachment, the signature field does not function correctly. Specifically, when both fields are present, the signature is not captured as expected.
I’ve attached two sample XLSForms to illustrate the issue. Both forms contain three main questions. The first question asks the user to either draw their signature or upload a digital copy. Based on the user’s response, the form displays one of the following:
A Photo question with Appearance: Signature
A Photo question with Appearance: Select (in the first form – Form A)
A Photo question with Appearance: Annotate (in the second form – Form B)
In this round of testing, I found that Form A fails to capture the signature properly, while Form B works as expected. The main difference between the two forms is as follows:
Form A includes a question that asks the user to upload an attachment.
Form B also includes a question that asks the user to upload an attachment, but the appearance for that question is set to Annotate.
Your screenshot appears to contain full names of people and some kind of identification numbers, and so will be censored to remove this potentially sensitive information. This is a public forum: please be a diligent custodian of your response data.
