If I change the order of the questions on an existing form will the structure of the data columns remain the same or will new columns be created to reflect the new position of the questions within the form?
Ideally I’d like to be able to swap a few questions around in an existing form that has data in it and have the data continue to be recorded under the same columns. Will that be the case?
You could best try it with a clone of your form and some test cases, please… You can see it in the table view and the Excel download (options XLM and Labels)…
Maybe, you can also share the related part of your form (both versions), please. And it would be interesting if you can tell the community what you found out, please.
I did some testing and found the following -
You can change the order of questions within a group and so long as the actual structure of the question remains the same, data will continue to be recorded in the same column as before. In te screen shot below I had moved the memory ‘Memory used…’ columns up in the order and it has continued to list data in line with that from the previous form.
Where data does split is if you move the question to a different group. In the screenshot you can see the split in the data where I changed the form and the data has been shifted to a new column to accommodate the new group name.
So basically, it seems that as long as they stay in the same group, you can move the questions around as you please.
Please someone correct me if I am wrong!
Another thing I found is that if you use robotoolbox to manage your data in Rstudio then it doesn’t seem to look at group names and all the data stays in the same columns regardless, so that solves that issue.
