I’m currently working on integrating small utility tools alongside data collection workflows, and I’d love your insight. For example, I developed a mini gratuity calculation tool for UAE workers that helps estimate end-of-service benefits quickly.
Here are some thoughts and questions I’d like to explore:
1. Has anyone embedded micro-tools (calculators, estimators) into questionnaires or dashboards to assist respondents or data users?
2. What’s the most effective way to trigger the tool (e.g., via a question, button, link) without disrupting the survey flow?
3. How do you ensure tool accessibility — mobile friendliness, offline fallback, minimal dependencies?
4. Any experience with data validation, security, or sandboxing these utilities when used alongside sensitive survey data?
5. What UI/UX approaches do you use so these tools feel like part of the system, not external add-ons?
I’m keen to learn from your experiences or see examples if you’ve tried this. Thanks!
If you wish to access other ‘tools’ within a form - say for the purpose of collecting a specific format of data which that tool exposes - then you might want to look at the external apps support in KoboCollect/ODK Collect. This will basically launch an external app - a completely different app outside of KoboCollect - which will then upon completion provide a data value back to KoboCollect (number, decimal, text, image…) to then include in your form.
It is important to note that this requires the external app in question to comply with the specific inter-app interface KoboCollect expects to harvest the resulting data, so it wont necessarily work with any arbitrary apps that might not understand the expected handshaking [namely, a specific usage of Android intent]
This mechanism to use external tools to provide data into your form certainly works, but it does require a reasonably degree of technical Android familiarity to accomplish in the general case, and it is probably best suited for situations where you are providing the external app in question yourself, so that you might ensure the necessary handshaking on both ends. But there are a few sample apps the do integrate into ODK/KoboCollect which you can look at to understand what is required; eg
Presently, only external apps can pull data from another app on your device, but you cannot pull it from an arbitrary web URL [although you could conceivably write a custom app to basically do just that for you…]. Although KoboCollect supports calling URLs that open a browser to the target website, this is only for display purposes and it cant then be used to pull data back into your form.
