Offline collection

Field work happens where the signal does not. CommonLynk Forms can be installed on a phone or a tablet and used with no connection at all, holding what you collect on the device until it can be sent.

Installing Forms on a device

Open the forms list in the device's browser. Where the browser supports it, a banner offers: Add CommonLynk Forms to your home screen for offline use, with an Install button and a Later button.

Choose Install and a Forms icon is added to the device beside its other apps. There is nothing to fetch from an app store: what you have installed is the platform itself, wrapped so that it opens like an app.

Working with no connection

Offline, the work carries on as normal. Answers are held in the browser's own storage on that device: a form you are part way through is kept as a draft, and a form you finish is added to a queue waiting to be sent.

While the device is offline a banner reads: You are offline, answers will sync when reconnected, together with a count of how many items are waiting. Submitting while offline saves the response to that queue and confirms with: Saved Offline. Response will sync automatically when online.

Drafts and restoring them

A draft saves itself as you type, about a second and a half after you stop. You press nothing to make that happen, and it happens whether or not there is a connection.

Reopen a form that has a saved draft on that device and you are asked whether to restore it. Accept and your answers come back as you left them; decline and you start the form afresh.

Sending what you collected

When the device finds a connection again the queue is sent in the background, with nobody having to remember to do it. An item leaves the queue when the platform confirms it has stored the response, and also when the platform recognises it as one it has already received, so retrying a submission can never create a second copy of it.

Syncing needs a signed in staff account with permission to add responses, because the queued items are being written into your workspace.

The limits to be aware of

Offline collection is deliberately simple, and there are things it does not do:

• A submission that fails for any other reason stays in the queue and is tried again at the next reconnection.
• There is no merge screen and no conflict screen. Nothing asks you to reconcile two versions of an answer.
• A failure is not announced to the person filling the form in. The only sign of it is the queue count staying above zero.