After one day receiving completed forms, I renamed a field adding some words, and redeployed the form. When I checked the table in “Data” I saw that the data within the renamed field was missing. Why this data was lost? Anyway for recovering?
Thanks!
Welcome to the community @fermoz! If you rename the label, nothing should affect your dataset. But if you rename the variable name you should be creating a new variable. For clear understanding please have a look at the image shared below:
Here, Age is the variable with the first deployment. I deployed it and then started collecting data. Submitted some data in the server and then had to rename the variable. So what i did was i renamed the variable Age to Age_1. Then redeployed it and then again submitted some data in the server. I then made a check on how my data is residing.
So basically, you should not lose your data even if you rename the variables. They get settled in a different variable. However, please be cautious while renaming a variable as it is always good to have a different variable in the survey form then to rename the variable. Besides, if you rename a variable within a repeat group question, you should also not be able to download your dataset. Hence, please be cautious while renaming and making redeployments.
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Hi @Kal_Lam, perfect clarification. In fact I could finally find the old variable with all data already collected. The problem was that this variable was relocated up to the last columns in the table and it looked like data was lost. Thank you very much!
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