Form to form pre-population of collections operates on a per question basis. This means it is possible for some questions in the same table or repeating subjection to populate from different source forms. This can happen if one question is not found in the source form that the other questions are populated from. The result can be that rows of data can be made up from questions that were never originally answered together. While in some cases that might be by design, in other cases it can happen inadvertently. This can also lead to a scenario where a multi-subject's table row or subsection is populated without any answers to the subject question.
In versions with the fix the following behaviour applies:
Missing questions in a source pre-population form
Where pre-population is used in forms for data from and to question collections, including:
Table.
Repeating subsection.
Subjects table.
Subjects repeating subsection.
Multi-subjects table.
Multi-subjects repeating subsection.
When that collection in Form A is configured to pre-populate, it would attempt to do this from the most recently dated form according to the pre-population method. In this example, the pre-population method is Last completed, and Form B was the last form completed.
If it was able to populate some, but unable to populate all the elements from Form B - e.g. one of the columns in the table or questions in the subsection does not exist in Form B but does exist in Form C, which is next in line for pre-population - then it would pre-populate the answers to that one element/question/column only from Form C. This could result in orphaned questions or incorrectly populated information.
Mixed pre-population within a collection
It was also possible that questions in a collection could be configured to have mixed pre-population methods. This is not something we would advise or support but recognise that this could be the case for some customer configured forms, as Mosaic does not validate this. In this case again, questions could be incorrectly populated as the different pre-population methods (e.g. Last started, last completed, through workflow) could pull back a set of questions from different sources, which could be misleading.
In versions with the fix:
Missing questions in a source pre-population form
Form pre-population in question collections will only populate answers from the initial form identified using the pre-population method (eg the Last started). Once a form with at least one question in the collection available to pre-populate is identified, it will only populate from that form and not attempt to populate any other questions within the collection from any other forms. Any questions not available in that source form will remain blank.
Mixed pre-population within a collection
Where a question collection is pre-populated using different pre-population methods within the one collection, this will no longer work separately for each question. Instead, the pre-population will work as below:
Mosaic will retrieve the relevant dates for all the pre-population methods configured in that collection.
It will identify the most recent date and that will dictate the form that is used to pre-populate the answers.
If there is more than one pre-population method and Through workflow is one of those methods, any questions using the Through workflow method will remain blank - this behaviour has not changed from previous versions of Mosaic.
We are looking to validate against this configuration in a future release.
We recommend that you review forms configuration and amend any question collections where the pre-population method is not consistent. We can provide/run a script to identify the forms affected by this specific part of the issue.