Form version added in calculation type question automatically in the XLSForm

User Support
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1

A question has been added automatically to the end of my form - its a calculation type question with the column name “version” and the question is called ‘‘v7Qi3XLsqcqEN8GsexFsu4’’. This doesn’t appear in Kobo Collect, but is calculated for every submission because it does appear as the final column in my data table.
What is this question? Why is it added automatically add what does the hexadecimal code mean?
Hope someone can help solve the mystery!

2

@ellyhiby, let me explain this with an example so that you are able to understand it pictorially.

  • You created a form and deployed them (first deployment). So you should get a form version in your XLSForm as shown in the image below:

    Image 2

    If you closely observe, you should be able to see that the form has only 1 question namely Name. The form version for this form is vM5dHLqGHR4wrNDQarbhdc.

  • After deploying, you may have also collected data for the form. Here I have collected 1 record (1 interview or whatever you say) for this purpose.

  • So at this point, say I felt like some questions have been missing in my survey form. Hence I added another question and then redeployed the form again (second deployment). So you should now get a form version in your XLSForm as shown in the image below:

    Image 3

    If you closely observe, you should be able to see that the form has 2 questions namely Name and Age. The form version for this form is vEmE8ddTRUVCS3kjZvuT9Y.*

  • Once again, you may have collected data for the form after deploying. Here I have collected another record (1 more interview or whatever you say) for this purpose.

  • If you view your form history under the FORM you should see that you have 2 form versions for this survey project:

    Image 4
    Image 41170×801 19.1 KB

  • Similarly, if you view the DATA>TAble and check out the records you should be able to see that you have 2 records that hold the data from 2 different versions viz. vM5dHLqGHR4wrNDQarbhdc and vEmE8ddTRUVCS3kjZvuT9Y. So this will tell you that you have data from 2 different form versions. If you look more closely, you should see that one version has only the Name variable while the other version has Name as well as Age variable.

    Image 5
    Image 51166×290 17.1 KB

This should give you additional information about your form and its version in the data which should be helpful for project or data managers for this project.

3

Thanks for the example - I understand now the purpose. May I suggest that the code used is something more meaningful? I understand that the hexadecimal is supposed to indicate different versions, but the code itself doesn’t provide any information relating to version number, or date/time deployed - making it difficult to match-up to previous versions of the form.
Thanks for your help,
Elly