Data Sharing with Custom Forms

Custom form data within XNAT can be associated directly with shareable datatypes such as Subjects and Experiments. As such, it is important to take care to understand the effects that sharing your data may have on the custom form information that is associated with it.

Sharing Custom Form Data Between Projects

Sharing of data with custom forms can be broken into three categories:

1. Sharing an element between projects which both have access to the custom form
2. Sharing an element from a source project to a destination project, where only the destination project has access to a custom form
3. Sharing an element from a source project to a destination project, where only the source project has access to a custom form

In scenario (1) above, both projects will have access to both the data and the custom form information as expected. Users who only have access to the destination project will be able to view and edit the element's custom form data within the destination project just as they would other data which has been shared into the project.

In scenario (2), the element will not have access to the custom forms that are located within the destination project. As such, even when editing one of these elements from within the destination project, no custom forms elements found only in the destination project will be available to be added to the shared element.

Within scenario (3), prior to sharing the element, users within the destination project will not have access to the custom forms that are associated with the shared element within the source project. However, in order to ensure correct persistence of data across projects, when an element is shared to a new project, the custom form data associated with that element will be visible and editable within the destination project. This will not provide the destination with blanket access to the custom form but it will allow users of the destination project to see the form's structure and fields as well as make changes to custom form fields which will propagate back to the source project. Therefore, it is important to be mindful when sharing data with associated custom forms fields of the possibility of new users gaining access to custom form data.

Search Tabs of Shared Custom Form Data

Shared custom form data will act differently when being used in search tabs than it will within the report and edit pages as outlined above. Therefore, it is important to be cognizant of the differences and how they may affect users before performing sharing operations.

Shared custom form fields will only be available within a search listing if both the source and the destination project have access to the custom form. Thus, unlike in scenario (3) above, sharing data from a project with a custom form to a project without that custom form will not allow a user to add a column from that custom form to a search listing in the destination project.

If you want to enable searching on custom forms data in this scenario, contact your site administrator to enable the custom form in the destination project. See Managing Project Subscriptions to Custom Forms