Folks -- I wanted to feed back some experiences from the Ghana implementation work which has gone on for the last 3 weeks here and also during Denis Adeletey's visit to Oslo. * If you click Save on just about any form when your session has timed out, it appears as if the Save has succeeded and the timeout relogin does not occur until the next menu item is selected. The user will already be annoyed at losing work, but to discover it some time later than when the added element turns up missing will be doubly frustrating. * The form editor still has an inconsistent, inconvenient interface with unpredictable behaviors. I know we are using it less often due to Word/Excel import, but it is virtually impossible to make even a minor change to an imported form using the form editor. * The floating window (data entry and form editor) is still awkward and too frequently in the way. Can we go to a taskpane approach? * There ought to be "Can change password?" and "Password forced change frequency" attributes to the user table and associated functionality. The user should not need edit authority on the user object to change their own password, but the ability to do so should be controllable in the case of intentionally shared passwords. * There ought to be some group-based assignments of datasets to org units and roles. This is currently a tedious and error prone process. * There ought to be better group editing capabilities. It ought to be possible to start with an existing groupset, clone it, then merge groups, edit group names, and transfer assigned objects (indicators, data elements, org units) from one group value to another. * The category combo options mechanism has got to be more amenable to change. Right now, you have to deassign the category combo from all data elements (and indicators and validation rules) that use it, delete the combo, delete and recreate the category, recreate the combo, reassign the data element. In the meantime, the data has become dissociated from its categories. I know that there are a lot of difficulties with changing options, especially in the distributed context, but at least it ought to be possible to add a new category option to a category involved in a category combo without destroying anything. * There need to be some extra text, numeric and object fields in the org unit table to which the implementer can assign field names and required status, and which show up on the org unit maintenance form. One org code is never enough to match up with other systems, there is always a town or postal code or some other address/contact piece to be added. You sinned against the users by simply discarding fields from the org unit table when you changed its structure. * There needs to be access to the organization table for calculating indicators, for example, # of facilities of type x per 1000 population. I know this doesn't deal adequately with the time dimension, but the whole system doesn't deal adequately with data elements that change slowly or infrequently. Perhaps the way to deal with this is to automatically create a data element with daily frequency that tracks the current value of an org unit attribute and changes in a stepwise way. * The user interface should be amenable to more customization, even on a per user basis. The DHIS2 logo and flag ought to be locations fillable from a set of povided and uploaded images. There ought to be a place for a "daily" message. * There needs to be more granularity of administrative privileges and they ought to be assignable on an org unit basis. Right now, we have to do too much administration at the national and regional level because the authorities are too powerful and unscoped. * I have a lot of reservations about the impending demise of calculated variables. I understand the impulse to separate inputs from outputs. But without calculated variables, the utility of the dataset report will be lost; the user will need to understand two different technologies to create the same output. Also, sometimes the data collected on the form is more granular than that which is to be put into the data cube, but not yet so numerous or repetitive as to require a line listing. In the case of Ghana, we have a form where the current use and inventory of each vaccine is recorded by lot number and doses/vial. For each vaccine, we have a maximum of 4 lot number-doses/vial combinations. The number we want to save is the current use and inventory of doses of each vaccine, a simple calculation but soon not to be available to us. I hope this raises some discussion and that some of it gets on the roadmap. Cheers, Roger
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