Hi there, I’m trying to edit the ‘select one’ choices for two questions in a form, but my changes after saving (and redeploying) keep being changed by the system. I have tried coming out of Kobo, saving and coming out of the form after each change, overwriting the ‘AUTOMATIC’ with one_two etc, but nothing works.
Both lists of choices are names. I successfully deleted some names from both choice lists of staff who have left, and to the first list wanted to add a new staff member; to the second list I wanted to add the same new staff member plus an ‘other’ option (with next question, ‘if other, name’ with skip logic unless ‘other’ had been selected.) I add the name, save, add ‘other,’ save. But when I come out of editing the form and go back in, either ‘other’ is appearing for both lists rather than just the second, or if I redeploy, both lists have two choices of the same new name and neither has ‘other’! I have tried various different things multiple times, but I can’t get my changes to stick.
Please can you take a look at what might be going on with this form? It’s called ‘BD Project Officer Story’.
Many thanks
Gemma
I’m trying to edit the ‘select one’ choices for two questions in a form,
This sounds suspiciously like a known issue - now fixed - whereby if you happened to explicitly duplicate a select_one/select_many - in Formbuilder - that the associated auto-generated choice list(s) between the two duplicates remains effectively ‘linked’. Such that subsequently changing the options in one select would have the side-effect of changing the options in the other (!).
I dont suppose you are using Formbuilder to create your forms? And if so, do you happen to recall if you used the ‘Duplicate Question’ feature in Formbuilder to create the second select from the first?
This should now be fixed in the latest Kobo, but if you had created your form previously and duplicated these questions in an earlier release, then it well may be that these questions in your form remain ‘linked’ together in this way (and, unfortunately, they will remain linked in this manner until you delete one of the other and recreate them)
You might consider deleting the second select and recreating it and all its options from scratch. I expect after doing so you will be able to edit the options in either select without affecting the other.
Thanks, that makes sense - I am pretty sure I would have used the duplicate question feature. I create forms on KoboToolbox rather than using spreadsheets etc, so I presume that is Formbuilder.
I will delete the second question and redo it. I think there will be a number of forms with the same issue, but at least now I know what’s going on now and how to fix it.
Thanks for solving the mystery!
Correct. The UI that Kobo provides for visually creating forms is typically called Formbuilder, or “Form Builder”. Whereas the predominant alternative is to write your forms as spreadsheet, in a specific format called XLSForm.
You can think of Formbuilder as a UI wrapper around XLSForm. You can initially write your form in Formbuilder and then still export it as an XLSForm for further modification. You can also import existing XLSForms into Kobo and, for the most part, edit them in Formbuilder. However, XLSForm provides a higher degree of customization and granularity as to what you can do vs what is exposed in the Formbuilder UI.
OK thank you. The only thing that makes me want to get to grips with the XLSForm route is the ability to have tables on a form. I will look into getting help from AI to save me time watching vids etc…
Many thanks for all your help and expertise!
