Study participant IDs can be managed using several mechanisms accessed via > Manage Study > Manage Participants.
When exporting study data, you can obscure the real participant ids by replacing them with randomly generated, alternate ids. You can either specify your own "alternates" or have the system generate random IDs using a prefix you choose. Alternate IDs are still mapped consistently to the same real IDs; there can only be one set of mappings.
Alternate IDs are unique and automatically generated for each participant. Once generated, the alternate IDs will not change unless you explicitly request to change them. Multiple publications of the same study will use the same alternate IDs and date offsets.
You can control the prefix and number of digits in the generated alternate IDs: go to > Manage Study > Manage Participants. You can also export a list of the alternate IDs and date offsets from this page.
In addition to assigning alternate IDs, you can also shift participant dates to obscure the exact dates but preserve the elapsed time between them. These "Participant Transforms" can be shared among different studies to maintain alignment of these 'obscured' values.
Once both are set, clicking Export will export a TSV file containing both the alternate IDs and date offset for each participant. If you already have such a file, and want to align a new study to match the same 'shifted' data, click Import to choose and import it from file or via copy/paste.
If you want to change a participant ID within a study, perhaps because naming conventions have changed, or data was accidentally entered with the wrong ID, or was entered for a participant before an alias was added to the alias-mapping dataset, you can do so as follows.
Note that participant alias datasets are never updated by this merge process; they must be maintained manually.
Suppose you discover that data for the same individual in your study has been entered under two participant IDs. This can happen when naming conventions change, or when someone accidentally enters the incorrect participant id. Now LabKey Server thinks there are two participants, when in fact there is only one actual participant. To fix these sort of naming mistakes and merge the data associated with the "two" participants into one, LabKey Server can systematically search for an id and replace it with a new id value.
If your study is date-based and contains a configured alias mapping table, you will have the option to convert the old name to an alias by selecting Create an Alias for the old ParticipantId. When this option is selected, a new row will be added to the alias table. For details on configuring an alias table, see Participant Aliases.
This option is not available for visit-based studies. To merge participant IDs and update the alias table in a visit based study, you must perform these steps separately.
To remove a participant from a study, either because they have unenrolled or for other reasons, you can select the participant ID here and click Delete.
You can also click the link to View participant data to view the participant's data in another tab, letting you confirm first that you are deleting the correct participant.
Deleting a participant will:
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