Loading error with very large survey

I am trying to deploy a very large form for a client and am finding the Enketo webform fails to load it, giving the error “loading error”. Has anyone encountered this before and/or knows how to resolve it? Or is there other ways of working around deploying a very large survey?

Note, unfortunately the client is not currently budgeted or planned to use their own smartphones/tablets so we can’t use a KoboCollect app deployment. It has to be a online-offline combo webform deployment.

Some details on my client’s survey:

  • the full survey is 1185 distinct questions (yes, I know!) with over 480 groups
  • it uses a single-select question to filter the majority of the questions to 1 of 3 streams such that most users will only see 450 of those questions
  • it is built from the XLSForm (which has 2148 rows)
  • it has 2 languages
  • this is being deployed in a facilitated workshop setting where untrained participants will be filling out the survey (ie it is not a set of trained enumerators doing a household survey).

I have successfully tested a deployment where the survey is split into 4 parts and all the questions load fine without any errors. So it does not appear to be an error in the questions or some XLSForm coding error. It all works, just not as 1 big survey.

Is there a way to deploy such a large survey using a web form? Note an additional reason 1 survey would be better than 4 parts is that we are linking this to a PowerBI dashboard via the API and 1 survey is a lot cleaner data model than pulling 4 surveys.

Thanks everyone!
McKay