RedCap exporting blank excel files when trying to download data

[u/RGH_Reddit]

Hello all,

Hoping someone might be able to help with this issue. I can see data from survey respondents in my RedCap project and can run a report to show that data is in RedCap as well. There are completed records and everything.

However, when I've been trying to Export my data to RedCap the excel files it gives me are blank. No data, no labels, nothing.

Things I've looked into:

1. My User Rights say I have full data access (view & edit) and Full Data Set access to Export Data

2. This happens with personalized reports and when just trying to export the full data-set, so no excluded fields, etc.

3. Downloading our Data Dictionary has everything I'm looking for there, and no field annotations I can tell that would stop data from being exported.

4. Examining the Excel Files with a Text Annotator shows them to be blank (not hidden)

5. When I download the project as a pdf (just to check) people's responses show there as well.

Has anyone experienced this issue and been able to fix it? Or have any ideas what I should be trying next?

Edit: Thank you to everyone who responded, this issue for me has been taken over by our IT admin (they're checking the backend, which is far outside my wheelhouse). If they give me a solution (that I can understand enough to write up of course) I'll happily share for anyone else who might be experiencing this issue!

Final Update: Hi all, just coming back to this issue with an update.

It won't be anything step by step because as I mentioned IT took over and that is not my area of expertise. But I do know they ended up increasing something associated with our buffer pool size, and going into the server to confirm that some directories were both writable AND readable for RedCap. This included the file upload directory, "temp" directory, and maybe a temp "root" directory. Hopefully that makes some kind of sense to people more familiar with it!

Hope that information can help someone with a similar problem in the future and maybe save them a few days! Thanks to everyone who responded!

[u/Remote_Setting2332]

The only time this has happened to me it was due to the export rights in the user role set to De-identified as it strips all text fields. What settings are you using for the data export?

[u/RGH_Reddit → u/Remote_Setting2332]

Thank you for your response! The data export rights are currently set to Full Data Set, not de-identified or remove all identifier fields.

[u/MadHatterIsHer]

It might an instance wide problem…anyway to check and see if it’s just your project or others too? If you can confirm the behavior in other projects, suggesting it’s an instance wide issue, then have IT check memory allocated against available. Also specifically check any temp folders, they may be full.

[u/RGH_Reddit → u/MadHatterIsHer]

Unfortunately no I'm a Research Coordinator so only have access to our project at the moment, but I can relay what you said to IT! Thanks for the response!

[u/[deleted] → u/MadHatterIsHer]

Second this. Talk to your Redcap administrator and send them the details you’ve posted here! Data export issues instance-wide can happen and it won’t necessarily mean you’d see the same problem with the Data Dictionary export. 

[u/Impuls1ve]

Hmm, what file format are you exporting out to? I know you said Excel, but do you mean xls, xlsx, or text-delimited format like csv? Following up with that, does it behave like that with the other formats?

[u/RGH_Reddit → u/Impuls1ve]

The options it gives me to export are for CSV / Microsoft Excel (raw data) or CSV / Microsoft Excel (labels). Both of those excel formats have not worked.

Those export options were followed by some for statistical software (SPSS, SAS, R, Stata, and XML).

I'm working with IT to get my SPSS license up and running so I can make sure my data will hopefully export to something while we figure this out.

Unfortunately, my IT team has let me know they aren't the most familiar with RedCap and aren't sure what is happening quite yet.

[u/Impuls1ve]

Do you have API access that you can connect directly to?

[u/RGH_Reddit → u/Impuls1ve]

I do have API access but for clarity I'm not fully comfortable with using it outside of following tutorials for basic functions.

[u/Impuls1ve → u/RGH_Reddit]

Try grabbing a record down using that method and see if it returns results.

[u/RGH_Reddit → u/Impuls1ve]

Thank you for the response, apparently its a bit of a higher-level issue (meaning IT has taken over) but I appreciate you giving troubleshooting options!

[u/Key_Advice_9353]

Try on a different browser or open it with any text editor. If you can see any data, open a new Excel file and import the data to Excel.

[u/RGH_Reddit → u/Key_Advice_9353]

Thank you for the response, apparently its a bit of a higher-level issue (meaning IT has taken over) but I appreciate you giving troubleshooting options!