September 2022 update on cht-core 4.0.0

The next major release of the CHT Core Framework passed a major milestone this week with the next generation architecture now ready for acceptance testing. Testing will cover installation, upgrading, self hosting, and clustering CouchDB. While our Quality Assurance Engineers are verifying the code, work will continue in parallel with more scalability testing and updating documentation for the new improved process.

Most of the other improvements coming in 4.0.0 are either merged or in the late stages of testing so won’t hold up the release. Depending on how testing goes for the architecture change, the release can proceed quite quickly from here.

Now is a great time to prepare for the upgrade by:

  1. Making sure all of your android devices are upgraded to v1.0.0+ of the cht-android app. This is a pre-requisite for the upgrade, and is backwards compatible so should be done before upgrading the server.
  2. Testing your forms with the new version of Enketo. We know of a few breaking changes with the latest version which may mean your forms don’t work as expected after upgrading. The latest version of the cht-conf tool has additional checks to detect some of these issues to make updating your configuration a little easier.
  3. If you’d like to try a pre-release beta of 4.0.0 let me know by replying to this thread and I’ll make sure you’re notified when it’s available.

And, as always, keep watching the forum for more updates!

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I wanted to add a technical note for those CHT App Developers out there! After you have updated to CHT Android v1.0.0+ and are running the latest cht-conf, if you want an easy way to test your forms in a development instance, upgrade to the 7786-fix-report-label branch. This branch is the latest stable 3.x branch that has the upgraded Enketo in it.

To do this:

  1. log in as an Admin and go to the admin section, choose upgrades:

  2. Expand the “Pre-releases” section by clicking on it and scroll down to the 7786-fix-report-label branch and click “Install” on the right:

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