Seed and Randomize: whats that preventing to deploy my form?

Hi All,
Recently I encountered a problem “seed value must be a number or a reference to another field” What is this? It was not there earlier. It is linked to some 'randomize". I am totallyt confused. Could you please explain what are these two. Urgent.

TIA

Hi @mosharaf,

Welcome back to the community! Randomizing choice order is a feature available within KoBoToolbox to reduce enumerators bias on selecting a response for a question. Choice order can be randomized for any of the select question types. Simply set randomize to true in the parameters column of the XLSForm survey sheet to display the choices in a different order each time the question is displayed as shown in the figure below:

In your survey tab:
Image%201
In your choices tab:
Image%202

Alternatively, you could also set randomize in the KoBoToolbox form builder user interface as shown in the figure below:

Please note that a seed value can also be used to recreate the order choices while displaying the choice. For this it will require a number or a reference to another field. This is why you are seeing the error message “seed value must be a number or a reference to another field”. To get rid of this, you could however simply turn off the feature of seed and simply use the randomize to true. It should also work smoothly (if you wish to randomize your choice).

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Thank you, it is helpful.

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Hi Kal_lam

Is it possible to make a random part of the answer choices.
Example:
Answer choices:

  1. Apple
  2. Orange
  3. Bananas
  4. Others … (specify)

the answer choices are random, except number 4 …

How to write it in XLSForm?

Hi @akoh,

Welcome back to the community! Would you mind having a look at the discussion that has happened earlier (which states its impossible). For details pleas have a look at the thread here.

Have a great day!

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How do you turn off the Seed feature?

You could simply uncheck the randomize as shown in the image above. Save the changes and then redeploy!

I did that, and I still received this message

Unexpected KoBoCAT error 400: b’{“detail”:“seed value must be a number or a reference to another field.”}’

I am also not able to preview

OK if this is the case, please follow the steps outlined as below:

  • Download your xlsform.
  • Make changes.
  • Replace the xlsform in the server.
  • Deploy/redeploy.
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Will try thanks

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Dear @Kal_Lam
I made a choice of answers and randomized them. I tried through the link https://ee.kobotoolbox.org… but it didn’t work. But when I try it in the KoboCollect application it works. Is it true that fearture randomize doesn’t work on https://ee.kobotoolbox.org… ?

@akoh, it should support both in Enketo and Collect android app. Would you mind trying the workaround shared in this post (topic)?

Thanks @Kal_Lam
wow.xlsx (12.2 KB)
Please correct if there is an error

Dear @Kal_Lam , is there something wrong with my xlsform wow.xlsx (12.2 KB) ? I tried with ODK - XLSForm Online v2.x and the application runs fine but does not support Enketo.

I made a choice of answers and randomized it. I tried through the link https://ee.kobotoolbox.org… but it didn’t work. But when I try it in the KoboCollect application it works.
Is it true that fearture randomize doesn’t work on https://ee.kobotoolbox.org… ?

This is my xlsform
wow.xlsx (12.1 KB)

@akoh, we will check this out if it’s a pyxform version that is affecting this with Enketo in our system. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

ok, hopefully it will fixed soon, thank you

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Dear @Kal_Lam can the randomize be fixed?

Hi @akoh, thank you for reporting this. I have confirmed the issue and will write a bug report :+1:

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hi @Josh thank you so much for your help here, but unfortunately my dad has passed away today, and this is his son that talking… hope you have a wonderful day!

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