Linking users with facilities and email issue

Our planned setup in brief - we have a web portal for which we want to use kobo app/forms in the field for data collection and upload daily. Data collection is against each ‘physical facility’, by a ‘facility user’. As we are new in kobo, our queries -

A. Can we setup or link each mobile app to ‘one facility’, that this specific mobile will be used for the specific facility?

B. Users don’t have gmail, in fact they don’t have any mail address. And it would be difficult to create mail address and start new sites on the go. How do we manage the implementation when new sites are added sporadically?

C. Can we link users with facilities?

D. Our system has 18000 health facilities (although data entry will be for selected facilities), we are struggling to understand how we download or sync the facility list and even user list from our system to kobo, for easy management.

Hi

Do you mean linking one mobile device to a facility? If so, that may not be feasible.

If you intend to use android devices, then you may not fully run away from installing a generic gmail address for the facility. However, you cannot also lock an email to a facility when using the application.

As a matter of design, no you cannot define a user and lock it to a specific geographic area.

I would suggest that you use cascading select approach where you start with a larger grouping of the facilities such as the provinces or districts. The approach would be to use this as described within our articles and the discussion that has happened below

On the issue of users you can also create logins that are also specific to a facility using the same cascading approach.

Normally it is much easier to initiate your form and then ask for support o the best tweeks. If you need much more advanced customizations, we also recommend you post on the job boards where you can get other users who may be able to support you directly based on your mutual agreement.

Stephane

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@mahmudmia
There is no feature in Kobotoolbox that specifically addresses your requirements. However, with some clever use of the pulldata() function you may be able to manage your A & C points. It might require some programming though.

For B, as far as I know Kobotoolbox supports multiple registrations using the same email address. However as @stephanealoo mentioned, you would need a Gmail account on the android phones anyway.

As for D:
This sounds similar to some of the work that my company is doing. We do have some separate systems to help with these kinds of process flows. If you are interested in a commercial solution that meets all your requirements (I think), you can send me a DM to discuss.

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For now we cannot opt for any commercial solution, as this is for a Ministry work, and one-off payment (and payment not committed yet).

We have managed to include Province and District drop down to filter the facilities in the next page for selection.

One relevant question - in the ‘list page’ from where you can select a record for editing - it shows [form name][Date time]. That does not help - as each form was entered for a specific facility. It is nearly impossible to find the specific form for one facility. Can we update the format of the list records?

Hi @mahmudmia

No you cannot update what you have already collected unless you go through editing them one at a time.

Stephane

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hi @stephanealoo , I could not explain what I want. Let me rephrase -

We are entering data for each day and for multiple facility. The page looks like the following with 2 facility data for a day -

The first record is for Facility A and the second one is for Facility B - the list can have 30 rows. From the ‘Edit Saved Form’ page it would be difficult for the user to identify record of Facility X easily. I was asking whether the format of the display in the above page can be changed to -

[Form name]
[Facility Name or any other field from the entry page]
[Date time]

@mahmudmia, seems like you are tying to do something that has been discussed previously: