List name not in choices sheet

Today is my first day using Kobotoolbox, so I’m looking for someone to help me out very much from square one. I’ve created and am now trying to deploy a form and i get the error message:

[row : 121] List name not in choices sheet: by0xe03

How do I address this? I’m pretty experienced at learning new softwares, but as far as Kobo goes, its news to me that a “choices sheet” exists. So I’d love a thorough rundown of how the whole XLS Kobo integration works, and how to troubleshoot this specific issue.

Welcome to the community, @bricevkarickhoff! Your survey project should have a question (either a select_one by0xe03 or select_multiple by0xe03) in your survey sheet, but at the same time, by0xe03 is missing under the choices sheet. You could check this out by downloading your survey form as an xlsform and then doing a search by pressing CTRL+F under the survey tab as well as the choices tab. As a backup, you could also check your xlsform here. It should be able to help you point out syntax errors if there are any.

Kindly please note, if you still cannot solve your issue, kindly please feel free to share your xlsform with the community. The community should be able to help you out.

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Alright that is helpful in diagnosing the problem. So I cloned another survey to create this survey (so that I didn’t mess up one we are deploying as I learn), and the rows on the survey sheet that contain by0xe03 relate to the questions that I changed the answer choices for.

So I didn’t do something when changing the answer choices in the survey that I needed to do in order to update the choices sheet accordingly. Any idea what that could be? When editing the survey I simple typed in new answer choices and associated XML values.

(On a different note, how do I indicate that I’m typing code or variables on these posts? is it like stack overflow where you type ‘’‘code’’’ ?)

@bricevkarickhoff, once making changes on your xlsform you could simply update and replace your survey project and then redeploy. The changes should be captured once you have redeployed.

I see how I could hypothetically go into the XLS form and type by0xe03 into the “list name” field and fill out those rows. That way the choices sheet would correspond with the survey sheet. But certainly it is easier to generate the proper choices sheet by using the actual kobo website as opposed coding everything into an XLS form. Is there a way that I can edit my survey such that I can redownload the XLS sheet and it contains the correct values in the choices sheet?

@bricevkarickhoff, you could always edit the same through the Form Builder UI. Please be informed that making edits through the xlsform is much easier in this case as you should already know what is causing an error. If you try to find it out through the Form Builder UI, you shouldn’t be able to identify by0xe03, neither would you be able to identify row : 121. But yes, if you know them, you could always update them through the Form Builder UI.

Maybe as a workaround, once you identify the questions (from the xlsform), you could to the same question in the Form Builder UI and then update them.

Okay so two questions then:

First, given that i have identified the questions from the XLS, what do I do to those questions in the Form Builder UI in order to make the necessary changes to get rid of the error message

Second, if I were to fix the problem in the XLS file, how do I put that XLS form back into kobo so that the survey can be deployed according to the edited XLS file.

First question is a bit more important but it would be helpful to know either

You should be able to edit your survey project (through a form builder UI) or replace and update your edited xlsform as outlined in this support article Deploying a Form to Start a New Data Collection Project.

Hi @bricevkarickhoff
Besides what @Kal_Lam has shared, I would strongly recommend that you look at the following back to basics articles, I normally find them helpful when I sometimes assume the obvious

  1. Creating forms
  2. Editing the forms in XLS

Stephane

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