Uploading saved submissions

Motivation

Sometimes you may not be able to upload submissions from a phone or tablet by using the refresh button. Perhaps because the phone is broken. One solution may be to remove the sd card from that phone and put it into another phone that also has fieldTask installed. It should then be possible to refresh the data and send it to the server.

If the phone cannot send, you can copy the raw submissions off it and send them to the server from a computer using the submission API. There is no page in the browser for uploading them.

Getting the data from the phone

Connect the phone to a computer with a USB cable and allow file transfer. The completed instances are in:

Android/data/org.smap.smapTask.android/files/projects/<folder>/instances

There is only one folder under projects. Its name is a random identifier created when fieldTask was installed, so it is different on each phone, and it contains an empty file called Default. If you use a variant of fieldTask then org.smap.smapTask.android will be different.

Each submission is a folder containing the submission XML file and any attachments such as photos. Copy the folders you need onto your computer.

Upload the instances

Send each submission as a multipart POST to /submission. The XML file is sent in a part called xml_submission_file and each attachment in a part named after its file name. For example using curl:

curl -u <user name> \
  -F "xml_submission_file=@<instance>.xml;type=text/xml" \
  -F "1718012345678.jpg=@1718012345678.jpg" \
  "https://<your server>/submission?deviceID=recovered"

curl asks for your password. The user must be allowed to submit results for the survey. A response of 201 means the submission was accepted. Sending the same submission twice is safe, the server recognises the instance ID and does not add the record again.