CommCare December Updates

Dear CommCare Users,

We’re happy to announce the following updates to CommCare.  Your questions and feedback are, as always, welcome and appreciated.

CommCare Mobile

CommCare mobile version 2.3 is now available!  Most Android phones will automatically update to the new version, but for Nokia phones you must change the version of your application on CommCareHQ to 2.3, rebuild the app, and re-install it on the phones.

These are the new 2.3 features:

Nokia phones (J2ME)

·  Pressing ‘#’ while the audio is playing pauses the audio clip instead of restarting it

·  Network Test is now user friendly with helpful graphics

·  Multimedia Validation Screen is now more helpful and easier to read

·  The CommCare HQ preview emulator now displays images in 2.3 applications (but not audio)

Android phones (CommCare ODK) 

·  Login screen has been rewritten to accommodate more screen sizes

·  Dates can now be entered in the Ethiopian calendar format

·  Pressing the audio button while the audio is playing pauses the audio clip instead of restarting it

·  Multimedia validation on install will prevent application startup unless all the referenced multimedia files are in the correct location.  Note that this will not affect apps automatically updating from 2.2 to 2.3.

·  CommCare now detects if the app is in airplane mode during sync and warns the user.

·  Added the ability to report issues directly from CommCare

·  The completed forms list can now be filtered and includes and labels forms which are unsent

·  More text can now be localized through CommCareHQ

Bug Fixes

·  Fixed issues with form entry engine with group display logic

·  Fixed issue where canceling load of an incomplete form caused the record to be lost

·  Fixed issue where sync didn’t always complete the server pull after submission

·  Fixed issue where “urgent” sync message styling didn’t clear out after successful sync

CommCareHQ

In addition to adding some cool new features, we’ve been working really hard on improving the speed and stability of CommCareHQ.  If you are dealing with slow Internet connections, you should hopefully see some improvements!  We’re also very excited about a new big addition to CommCareHQ: the CommCare Exchange

CommCare Exchange

You may have seen our email announcing the CommCare Exchange.  We are pleased to announce the release of the CommCare Exchange.   The Exchange is a platform for CommCare users around the world to publish and share their CommCare mobile applications with others.

CommCareHQ users can download, modify, and use any published application under the terms of its license.  If you created an application on CommCareHQ, you can publish your application to the Exchange under one of the Creative Commons licenses (read here for more on Creative Commons[1]).

Dimagi has started off the Exchange with some of our own content.  View it now at  https://www.commcarehq.org/exchange.

We welcome you to start sharing your own applications with the CommCare community!  For more details see our Exchange FAQ [2].

New Features

·         “Time until date” format in the case list and detail screen: In addition to “time since date”, which displays the amount of time (in months, days, weeks, or years) since a the specified date case property, we have now included “time until date”.

·         Bulk download of users and groups: you can now download the users.xls template of all your users and groups.  This makes it easier to make any changes and take full advantage of bulk upload of users and groups.

·         Archiving forms: You can now “archive” a form, which will suppress it from showing in any reports.  You can do this by navigating to the Submit History and viewing a form.  However, this will not undo any changes that the form may have made to the case.

·         Instantaneous daily custom form export download: If your custom exports take a really long time to download, we can set up the daily download feature.  Your custom exports will be generated on a daily basis, so that when you download the data it will be instantaneous. To set this up, please contact us at commcarehq-support@dimagi.com.  Note that this is currently only for custom form submission export, not for custom case export. 

Performance Improvements

·         Fixed a bug causing excessive slowness on HQ in general 

·         Page speed improvements that help the load time of every single page by a small amount 

·         Improved speed in saving forms from vellum (to be released today) 

·         Improving speed of case list and case manage data speed improvements

·         add caching framework for reports. we’re rolling it out slowly but expect to make reports faster one-by-one once we are able to do testing

Happy Holidays!

Amelia

[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
[2] https://wiki.commcarehq.org/display/commcarepublic/CommCare+Exchange+FAQ