Forms Designer
The Forms Designer is a web-based software application that runs on a server and is accessed through a web browser to remotely design electronic forms. Since our forms technology is based on XFORMS, an open standard for electronic forms, it has many important features that enable the Study Manager to improve the quality of the data collection process at the source of data itself. Some of the important features are:
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An input field in a form can be validated while data is being entered, to prevent nonsensical values from being accepted at the source of input itself
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Fields can have range checks
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Fields can have calculations based on values in other fields
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Complex skip-logic can be used to change the sequence of questions based on conditions
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Fields can have many data types such as alpha, numeric, decimal, date, gps, image, audio, video etc.
All these features help improve the quality of data and avoid the need for double entry that is so prevalent in traditional data entry requirements.
A major feature of the Forms Designer is that the schema for the database tables is automatically designed during the process of forms design, thereby eliminating an important database design step in traditional approaches.
Once the studies and forms are designed, a field worker can download pre-assigned forms onto a mobile device through a mobileclient via GPRS connection for data collection. When data is collected and sent from the mobile device to the server, it is stored in XML form which can be used in any application that understands the format. While the collected XML data is automatically exported to persistent storage in the database, it can also be exported to a CSV file for exchange with other applications.
The Report Generator is a software component that is used to design reports for presentation of data in the visual format required by the Study Designer or Researcher. Reports are basically pre-defined queries that use SQL to access the data in the persistent database. Reports also provide the primary interface for driving the GIS and Analyzer components for further analysis of the data.