Autofilling a big part of a kobo questionaire based on one particular identifier

User Support Form Building
1

I am trying to create a quite complicated questionaire for fisheries data collection in Bangladesh.
I want enumerators to record the catch from fishing vessels very regularly.
Each boat has a lot of information associated with it (length, tonnage, etc) which doesn’t change and only needs to be input once. Each boat has a unique ID say LI298.
So the first time data are entered, the form needs to ask for all the boat info. But the next time, add infinitum, the enumerator types LI298 into the top of the form, all that information just needs to be autocompleted and hidden too if possible. I don’t have a list of all this information so can’t add it. It needs to be built up over time…
I have looked all over for a solution but can’t seem to crack it.

2

Hi @dougal and welcome to the community!

KoBoToolbox supports Dynamic Data Attachments — KoboToolbox documentation which you can connect two forms to get information from one to the other one.

I think, you can create 2 different forms, 1 for boat information and 2nd for your regular process, that way when someone enters the boat ID to the 2nd form, you can get information needed from 1st one.

Hope this helps, if not feel free to ask, community would have so many amazing ideas and workarounds to solve this :slight_smile:

All the best,

1 Like
3

Thanks I think that makes sense in a normal database context too: one table for all the person and boat information and one for all the catch data. I will let you know how I get on.

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4

instance(‘survey’)/root/data[P_Demographic/P_SN = current()/…/C_SN]/P_Demographic/P_Age
In this example the child and the parent have P_ and C_ prefixes. Is this necessary? Would I have to call my Vessel_Identifier column P_Vessel_Identifier and C_Vessel_Identifier ?

5

Hi @dougal, I believe they use those column names so it can easily identified as Parent (P_) and Child (C_) forms.

In theory you can name anything you want, but keeping syntax easily understandable is a good practice.

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I just can’t get it to work. When I create a child project, download the XLS file and add the row at the top with xml-external survey and reupload it just fails to even view.