Hello everyone! 
A challenge I often have at work, is getting colleagues (as well as others who are new to ODK/Kobo/SurveyCTO) to make cascading select questions - specifically, making clean lists that can be added to xlsforms. This often becomes more challenging as the data and number of unique levels, and nesting structure gets larger or more complex.
To deal with this, I made small app to help users of ODK, KoboToolbox and other xlsform-based survey apps, make cascading lists for nested questions, using unit-level datasets. It allows for upto 20 levels of nesting, accepts .csv, .xls and .xlsx datasets (upto a max size of 30mb for now!), and lets you download the ready-to-use cascade lists. Check it out here: CascadeR
For example, if you want to do a school survey, and you want to nest schools in this order: State ā District ā Ward ā Village, you just need to upload your raw data (This could be EMIS student level data perhaps), and the app will produce nested lists of unique levels at each level (string, numeric etc., it doesnt matter!).
I have been testing it for the last week, and it seems to work fine, but ofcourse, iām always keen to get feedback from the pros!
How it works:
- Upload a dataset
- Choose number of levels in the nesting structure
- Arrange variables in order (Level 1 is the highest level and Level N is the lowest)
- Preview the lists
- Download the cascade lists in a xls file
Do let me know what can be done to improve it!
PS: Currently, a Stata package is also complete, but is being tested a bit more, and I have almost finished the python version too. I hope you guys find this useful!
Best,
Zaeen
