CommCare – How to Set Up Excel Import to Update Case Property to Null

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I have a case property in a CommCare app that has a value for a few hundred cases. This case property should never have been set for these cases. I have corrected the app structure to prevent the issue going forward, but I also need to set the value of the properties for existing cases to null using the Excel Case Importer tool. Setting the cells to empty or "—" did not work.

How should the Excel file be formatted in order to accomplish this?

Best Answer

What you're trying to do is slightly tricky and has tripped up many of us, but fortunately it is possible!

I assume you tried to do an import with 2 columns, one for case_id with the IDs of all the cases you want to update and one for property_x, which you left blank or as "---". Unfortunately, excel importer ignores any cases where all of the values are blank or "---", so none of your cases were updated. :(

The way around this is to add a 3rd column to your import. I would make this column "name", as the name property should be non-null for every single case. The values for this column should just be the names of the cases as they are in a case export. Now when you do the import, every cases will have a non-null value to update, so the case update will not be ignored. This won't affect the name property, since you are updating to the same value that it was before, but it will update the property_x property to blank (just use an empty cell, not "---").

Related Solutions

CommCare – How to Set Up Case Management to Update Only User Case Data

For this, you can leave the Case Management tab as "does not use cases." This controls the cases of the case type you've selected in your module.

The User Case will automatically be loaded into your form when you choose a form that has User Case setup.

CommCare – How to Filter Instances by Case Property

If you're filtering cases, you want an expression that ultimately returns a set of cases. The first part of the expression, instance('casedb')/casedb/case, gives you all cases on the phone.

The expressions in square brackets then filter the cases by case type, parent (you're limiting to cases that are children of the "current" case, which is the one you selected from the case list), and open/closed.

[@case_type='Indicators']
[index/parent=current()/@case_id]
[@status='open']

The /[contractions_dur = 'low'] is what's throwing the error. The / says to go another level deep, but I suspect what you want is to just add the contractions_dur as a fourth constraint, on the same level as the others. So try dropping the slash: instance('casedb')/casedb/case[@case_type='Indicators'][index/parent=current()/@case_id][@status='open'][contractions_dur = 'low']

Best Answer

Related Solutions

CommCare – How to Set Up Case Management to Update Only User Case Data

CommCare – How to Filter Instances by Case Property

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