Only new submissions, begun after you updated your form, will benefit from the changes you made. We strongly encourage you to maintain back-ups of all deployed versions of your forms, and to keep detailed notes on the changes you make. You can download the spreadsheet form definition for any form by clicking Save Download form definition in the designer or Download Form files in the Your forms and datasets section of the Design tab.
If you're editing spreadsheet form definitions directly, one easy strategy is to add a "notes" worksheet to each of your survey forms, and to add detailed notes there as you make changes; SurveyCTO will simply ignore the extra worksheet, but it can be incredibly valuable to your team — particularly as they work to interpret collected data. SurveyCTO keeps track of each form based on its unique form ID on the settings worksheet , so two forms uploaded with the same form ID but different version numbers are, by definition, two versions of the same form, and two forms uploaded with different form IDs are, on the other hand, treated as two different forms.
Ultimately, all data is stored, aggregated, viewed, and exported based on the form ID, so the data for different form versions that share a single form ID will mix together.
When viewing or exporting your data, the view or export will be based on the current latest deployed version of the form available on your server. That version of the form is what will govern which fields and which groups of fields get displayed or exported.
Data collected with earlier versions of the form may be missing some data in the case of fields or groups that were added later and may have some data for fields or groups that have since been deleted. In the former case, where fields are missing for a submission, those fields will be exported as blank or empty — unless you set the option in SurveyCTO Desktop to specify some other character or string to use for missing values. In the latter case, where data exists for fields or groups that no longer exist in the latest version of the form, that data will simply not be exported at all.
If you need to remove fields or groups from your form, but still want to access the responses they received while they were in the form, you have two options:. For each row i. Every SurveyCTO export will also include a "data export report" that will help you to understand the exported data, including a summary of which form versions were used to collect that data.
See Data export reports to learn more. Finally, you will want to take some care in how you alter the groups within which your form fields reside, because SurveyCTO internally tracks each field by a full name that includes all enclosing groups. SurveyCTO exports attempt to automatically merge data for same-named fields, ignoring such group-name differences, but this slows down the export process and SurveyCTO Desktop allows you to change export settings to no longer ignore groups to speed things up.
Also, this automatic merging process can't work when you change anything about the repeat groups that enclose a field — so your best bet is to avoid adding or removing groups, renaming groups, or moving fields across groups. While you can change most things about an existing form, you cannot change the encryption settings. In other words, you can't change a form from unencrypted to encrypted, you can't change a form from encrypted to unencrypted, and you can't change the encryption key used to encrypt the form.
To make any changes to a form's encryption settings, you will need to change the form's unique form ID on the settings worksheet so that the updated form will essentially be treated as a new form altogether. This is because you simply cannot mix data for two form versions if those versions have different encryption settings.
It would just never work. We use cookies on this site to provide and improve our services. By using our site, you consent to cookies. Learn more However, since the latest version of the form doesn't include that field any more, when you review an older submission in the Data Explorer or export your data, the field doesn't appear.
SurveyCTO has data for that field, but there's no field in which to show it when you review the submission, and there's no column in which to export it when you export your data. So you don't see that data. Take another example: you rename a field. From SurveyCTO's standpoint, a renamed field is really just one field that was deleted and another one that got added.
So if the current form collects data for a field named "age", then that's the field that shows up when you review submissions and the column that appears in your export; if you have data for an earlier field named "childage", but no such field now exists in the form, then that data won't show up anywhere.
A far more subtle case concerns changes to the groups within which fields are located : SurveyCTO keeps track of fields a little like computers keep track of files, using not only the field name, but also the groups within which the field resides.
If you add, remove, or rename groups, it implicitly renames all fields within those groups, which has the effect of making it like some fields have gone away and some new ones have been added. This can then have the net effect that data from older forms disappears from the Data Explorer and from data exports. Please see Updating an existing form for a full discussion of how to safely update existing forms, and for more on the implications of and remedies for different kinds of changes to your form.
If you need more help, you can post a message or open a request in the Support Center. We use cookies on this site to provide and improve our services. By using our site, you consent to cookies. Learn more
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