CommCare Developer Options

Overview

Available starting in CommCare 2.36 – The Developer Options are a group of advanced settings in CommCare that are hidden by default, since they offer extra levels of configuration that are beyond the scope of what most CommCare users are interested in. However, for advanced users and app builders, they can be useful for configuring more nuanced behaviors and preferences within CommCare.

How to view the Developer Options 

1. Open the "About CommCare" menu item from the home screen 5 times in a row

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2. Then open the "Settings" menu item from the home screen, scroll to the bottom of that page, and you will see an item called "Developer Options". Select this to view and edit any of the settings in Developer Options.

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How to Enable/Disable a Developer Option

Once you are in the Developer Options list, you can click on any item to toggle whether or not it is enabled. First, select an item in the list to get this pop-up:

Details about each Developer Option setting

Developer Mode Enabled

Used to enable/disable this menu

For use in Custom Properties:

• key: cc-superuser-enabled

• valid values: 'yes' or 'no'

Show Update Options Item

Used to toggle the visibility of the "Update Options" settings item in both the main Settings menu and the Update Activity (see Control Application Version During Updatesarchived for more details).

Available Since: CommCare 2.36

Detect and Trigger Purge on Form Save

This flag is a preview for a feature which is useful on devices with complex case hierarchies. Essentially, when the flag is enabled CommCare detects situations where cases should be removed from the phone. This can happen, for instance, because a case's owner changed and may no longer match the current user. Without this flag odd situations can occur like a case being reassigned but still show up in the case list until the user presses sync (the sync doesn't need to succeed to fix the problem, just needs to occur).

The downside of this flag is that the purge process can be quite time consuming, especially on apps which have tens-of-thousands of cases. It can be enabled on any app, but should be disabled if it is causing performance problems to occur when forms are saved.

Image Above Question Text Enabled

By default, images in a form appear below question text, like so:

Enabling this developer option makes it so that images instead appear ABOVE question text, like so: