Picture downloaded only once

1

Dear Survey Solutions team,

Recently, we implemented a survey that contains picture-type questions. When performing a binary data export, the photos are exported only once. If the binary export is performed again, an empty ZIP file is produced. Is this behavior normal? Can the photos collected during the interview be exported only once? We are working with version is 23.09.4 (build 35728) .

Thank you very much for your clarification.

** An additional comment: the survey also had audio auditing programmed, and the audio files are exported each time a binary data export is requested.

2

You can check at the demo server that the binary data export file can be generated multiple times and that it includes the same content regardless whether it was already downloaded or not.

3

If you have set up your infrastructure to work in the farm mode, please verify that all nodes are using the same settings to the same network shared location.
If it’s not properly set up, one node will save files to the location that is not available to another nodes.

4

Thank you for your comments regarding this situation. Survey Solutions is installed as a Docker container and the database is a RDS instance on AWS. This is not a farm installation. Since the binary data export process is generating empty ZIP files, we are looking for the images in the PostgreSQL tables but cannot find them. We are also searching the file system without success. The questionnaire variable is called land_picture . Could you please indicate where the binary files associated to this field are stored? Thank you.

Screenshot 2024-07-10 at 10.25.02 PM
Screenshot 2024-07-10 at 10.25.02 PM362×840 7.58 KB

5

Since you are using AWS, consider storing your binary data in an S3 bucket. See instructions in the section S3 Configuration here: AWS setup

6

Thank you for your guidance. We checked the existence of the S3 bucket, but unfortunately, we found it empty; there were no images in it.

7

It was a recommendation for your consideration to use S3 bucket for data storage outside of your container and file system but not the place to look for the files.
Please refer to documentation: Deployment with Docker (mysurvey.solutions)
I hope you’ve created dedicated volumes to have your data persisted outside of the container.

8

@aguinada, has this been resolved?

  • If yes, what has helped?
  • If no, what additional information can you provide?
9

We decided to make a fresh new installation. We deployed the Survey Solutions docker container and configured an AWS EFS storage type repository to host the pictures, we tested it and now it works fine.

Unfortunately we could not determine the reason why the pictures were not stored in the previous instance we had. Thanks for your help.