Seamless movement of records from one fulcrum app to another fulcrum app
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Elia Pirtle
I have been really impressed by all of Fulcrum's features, but have found one thing I think is a really glaring missing feature:
I want to move records created in one fulcrum app to another easily.
In this case, it is the 'draft app' I have been using to figure out what features we want. Now that we are happy, I have created the new final version of the app (as I didn't want to break any of the records collected in the old app by changing the draft app structure into the desired final structure). So I want to add the old records into my new app (which includes records with repeatables). I am finding it surprisingly difficult for two reasons:
1) I can't use the csv export/import to move the records, as I want to maintain complex geometry (our records use combinations of points, lines and polygons)
2) The esri shapefile export/import workflow requires I have to import each type of geometry seperately, and parents before the from repeatable children. To import successfully, this means I have to manually edit each shape file to update the record IDs to get parents and children to match up again (see help chat record opened July 18th with Sandeep with username llf@platypus.org.au for full description of the problem). This is extremely fiddly for something that I think should be an easy fulcrum feature - moving records from one fulcrum app to another.
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Elia Pirtle
For further clarification, here is the current fulcrum workflow, based on how I was advised on the help line: I want to copy three records from one app to another app. I have built a very basic 'source test app' with advanced geometry enabled and one repeatable section, and a 'destination test app' that is identical. My 'source test app' has three records, one of each geometry type (one line, one point, one polygon) where each of these parents has 3 children each, one a point, one a line, and one a polygon). I download the shape file of the source app. Then I import into my 'destination app' just the parents. They get assigned new recordIDs automatically. Now I must open the child shapefiles in QGIS. I must manually update the parent IDs in the attibute table, to replace the parent IDs from the 'source app' with the new IDs that were generated when I imported the parents into the 'destination app'. Afte manually editing each child's parentID attribute, I export the shape files again from QGIS. Then I must download the parent records from the 'destination app' as shape files. These new downloaded shape files have the new parent IDs. I must then take the manually edited child shape files, and zip them up with the parent shape files which I downloaded from the 'destination app'. Now I have a zip file with matching parentIDs between the parents and children, that match the parent IDS of the parent records already in my 'destination app'. Now I can finally import the children to my 'destination app'. But because the importer only allows you to include two shape files at a time (one parent and one child) and because I have three shape files for parents and three for children (one each for point, line and polygon geometry), I must do 9 imports, where 2/3 of the rows will fail in each import. For example, for my first import, I attach the parent polygon shape file and the child polygon shape file. One of the three children in that polygon shapefile finds its parent (and is successfully imported). The other two polygon children in that share file do not find their parents, because their parents are lines and points respectively, and only the parent polygon shape file is attached. So I go ahead with the import anyway and one polygon child is added to the parent polygon record. So after 9 imports, where 2 rows fail each time and 1 succeeds, I finally have imported my 3 parents with their 3 children each into the 'destination app'. This seems like a crazy clunky way to move data from one fulcrum app to another!!