Sharing custom field visibility options within a study

[simroux]

This is a feedback / user request coming from the GSC workshop, probably a low-priority feature request but I wanted to create an issue while still fresh in my mind :-). It seems like there is (a large) interest for users to toggle field visibility, then share these choices with others in the same study. The use case is a PI with a group of undergrads who will do the actual sampling: their "ideal" process would be (i) they create a study, and pre-select fields to be visible in the App, (ii) the students go into the field, and only see these fields to fill in so are not overwhelmed / have less chances of making mistakes.

Thinking (briefly) about this, I feel one way to do this would be to allow for these field visibility options to be stored and shared at the study level ? So my thoughts/questions for now would be:

• 1: Could we store custom field visibility options at the study level, and set them available for all users when in this study ?
• 2: Could we store multiple custom field visibility options per extension/package ? (may be complex, but I could imagine users asking for this as soon as 1 is implemented, could be fine to say "no we can't")
• 3: Could we export / import multiple custom field visibility options across studies ? (same as 2, I could imagine it being useful, but also not a major barrier, worst case scenario PIs just have to redo the initial selection for their new study, should be reasonable).

[eecavanna]

During today's squad meeting, I proposed the following as a potential solution. This is an elaboration on item 3 in the issue description above. It doesn't involve any servers or any distributing of files.

Export

The "export" could be achieved by allowing the user to get the custom field visibility options as a URL with the options embedded into it (e.g. as a query parameter), similar to how diagrams.net can generate a URL that has the diagram data, itself, embedded into it. So, the PI can generate such a URL and then provide that URL to his or her students.

Import

We can then update the app's deep link-handling code to check for that payload and—if found—update the app's field visibility options to match it. So, when a student visits that URL, their app automatically adopts those field visibility options.