Retiring a field

Removing a field from a form is not the small act it looks like. That field has been published on every entry ever filed against the template, and — where it was linked to a monitored parameter — its figures are sitting in every dashboard, chart and report that reads them.

So Trackapt asks a question when you remove one.

The question you are asked

Removing a field opens a confirmation offering two outcomes:

Choice	What happens to the figures it published
Keep them	They stay live. Reports carry on counting them.
Stop them reporting	They are moved to an archive and stop appearing anywhere.

Neither choice destroys anything. The second moves the rows out of the live data rather than flagging them, which is why the change is complete and consistent everywhere at once — there is no screen that kept a copy.

Which should I choose?

Keep where the field is being removed because you no longer collect it, and the history is still true. Stop reporting where the field was wrong — a mis-linked parameter, a figure that turned out to mean something else — and its history is misleading rather than merely old.

The field itself is archived, not deleted

A removed field is kept on the section as a retired field, with its original identity intact.

That matters because a form's values reconnect to their fields by the field's key. Rebuilding a removed field by hand would derive a new key from whatever you named it, and every stored value would be orphaned. Archiving it verbatim means it comes back as itself.

Restoring one

There are two routes back, and they never overlap, so one archived field can never be added twice:

Route	Use it for
Link an existing parameter, in the add-field picker	A field that was backed by a monitored parameter. The picker shows a restore badge where an archived field backs the parameter you are picking.
Restore removed field, beside Add field	Everything else — chiefly form-only fields. This is the only route in a section that links to no tracker group.

Restoring is an ordinary save of the template. When a field comes back, the figures that were archived with it are replayed into the live data.

A link to a parameter the group no longer has is stripped on restore

The field comes back; the dead link does not.

Editing an old entry does not destroy a removed field's history

When you open an entry filed before a field was removed, the form filler holds that field's stored values aside and writes them back on save. Without that, editing one old entry would quietly erase exactly the history that makes restoring worthwhile.

Related changes that behave the same way

Two other edits archive figures the same way, for the same reason:

• Removing a tracker row or a section instance from an entry retracts the readings it had published.
• Clearing or re-pointing a field's linked parameter archives the figures published under the old link. Re-linking does not automatically restore them — use the restore route above.

Item properties are not archived

An item property removed from a tracker group takes every item's value for it, permanently. There is no archive and no restore. The screen says so before it happens — but it is worth knowing that the two look similar and behave completely differently.