Google sheets submission column heading starts with "data"

1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.
Google sheets submission columns start with "data" instead of the name of the .xml file. For example, if I have a file called Info.xml, it usually has the following column header: "Info-FirstName" but has instead "data-FirstName" now. This only happened recently so I am not sure if this is intended. If it is intended, is there a way to change this?

2. What app or server are you using and on what device and operating system? Include version numbers.
App- ODK Collect 1.25.2
Operating System PC- Windows 10 Home
Smartphone- Samsung A50, Android version 9 Pie

3. What you have you tried to fix the problem?
-I tried to submit on a different google account.
-I left the form_id and version fields empty in the settings sheet.
-Created a basic survey on another google account.
-Reset odk collect settings to default.

4. What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?
-Submit survey data to google sheets with the submission_url specified.

5. Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach below.
I uploaded the basic survey I used to test which gave the same result.

You can go back to an Info prefix by adding a name column to the settings worksheet and putting Info below it.

The prefix comes from the XML form definition. What you're experiencing is a side effect of a recent change to the XLSForm form conversion tools that will affect newly-converted forms. It used to be that the XML root node name was set from the form name. However, that caused problems when the filename was very long, changed over time, or contained characters not valid in an XML element name. Now, the root node name is always data by default.

We've talked in the past about removing the prefix from the column headers since it is not very helpful. Now that most forms will have a data root node name, it's even less helpful and really just adds noise. We should consider again how we can do this in a way that doesn't disrupt ongoing data collection.

(FYI @Grzesiek2010 since you've been in related conversations recently)

@LN Thank you that fixed it. Also on a side note that I really want to know is if newer versions of odk collect would still support the feature for you to place media in the "name-media" folder in google drive to download media as you download the blank form without placing the files manually in the /sdcard/odk folder? I just wanted to know because I saw there are going to be a lot of changes to odk collect because of the new Google API requirements and this feature is very convenient.

1 Like

Good question and thanks for reading about those upcoming changes (Collect will need to stop using /sdcard/odk for files)! Yes, this should all continue to work seamlessly. The only workflows that should be affected are the ones that involve direct access to ODK files such as pushing with adb or using other applications that integrate with Collect. Everything else should work the same.

We will be publishing a beta in the next few days with the storage change and would appreciate your help confirming that this is the case for functionality that you rely on. We're trying to test everything but Collect has a lot of different behavior that can sometimes combine in unexpected ways so getting some feedback from users is always much appreciated!

I will definitely test the beta to check if this feature still operates correctly. Thank you for all the assistance. :grin:

1 Like