Deleting Erroneous Survey Reminders

There is an ancient bug in REDCap, long ago fixed, that created a data bug that plagues some old REDCap projects on old REDCap systems. It causes novel pre-scheduled survey reminders to not get purged after the survey is completed. The bug persists in mid-2023 and is elusive.

Whereas we don’t know where the data bug is, we can see the symptoms in the form of non-deleted invitation reminders for completed surveys. These are easy to see by looking in Surveys/invite_participants.php for future invitations with completed responses. It’s easy to delete them manually there as well, but as new ones are being created every day, it presents a maintenance problem. They have to be deleted before a reminder to a completed survey goes out.

Should this bug exist on your REDCap system, the script delete_erroneous_survey_reminders.R Can provide some relief. It enumerates all the future survey reminders on a REDCap system that already have completed responses and deletes them. It logs this activity in the job log.

Activation

Should you want to use this on your system, follow the instructions at REDCap Custodian to make a new R Project from the study_template if you don’t already have such a project. Then revise cron/delete_erroneous_survey_reminders uncommenting the cron line and adjusting the frequency to your needs. Then build and deploy your R Project.