How to bulk archive forms submitted with a shared login on CommCare

Archiving any form causes CommCareHQ to rebuild any cases affected as if that form had never been submitted. So, if you archive a registration form, it actually un-opens that case and it's like that case never existed.

Archiving a registration form when there are follow-up forms submitted can therefore cause problems, as it leaves a bunch of forms that are applied to a case that never existed.

There is a new change to CommCareHQ which should no longer allow you to archive a registration form when other forms exist for that case, thus preventing the problems described above. Now, if you want to delete a case, you have two options:

1. Archive all follow-up forms and then archive the registration form. This will also delete all of the form data.
2. Assign that case to a temporary user (say username Delete). Then delete user Delete. This will delete the case but not the form data.

Disclaimer: Always be very careful about deleting any data off of CommCare. It is not always possible to recover data if you delete something accidentally.

You shouldn't have to set the owner_id unless your workflow is non-standard. The basic assumption is that all cases will be opened by the facility level user. If this isn't the case e.g. supervisors are creating the child cases, then you will have to manually set the case owner.

You can read more about how to do that on the help site: https://help.commcarehq.org/display/commcarepublic/Assigning+Cases+to+One+of+Multiple+Locations