I’m building a Kobo survey in xlsform with cascading selects that filter down the list of options based on different geographical categories (i.e. province, regency, district). Since the list is fairly long and may get updated over the course of the project, I’m using the select_one_from_file question type.
Ideally, I’d like to have all my geographical markers in a single CSV file vs. uploading different CSVs for each question. This is a functionality that most competitors to Kobo offer. Whether or not Kobo offers this feature is unclear, based on extensive searching online, including the forum.
The help article for select_one_from_file only provides a simple example, where there is only one response option list in the attached file, and the names of the columns in the CSV match the column names in the “choices” sheet of the form file:
The Kobo help article refers to xlsform documentation, which provides an example of how to reference an external CSV/XML that has different column names vs. the form file’s choices sheet, by adding a “parameters” column on the “survey” sheet to tell the form which columns to look up in the attached CSV:
In theory, this functionality would allow the user to have multiple lists housed in different columns within the attached CSV. However, when I tried to replicate this functionality in Kobo, I got the following error when I redeploy the form:
This seems to indicate that the functionality mentioned in xlsform documentation (i.e. column names in the CSV can differ from the column names in the form file’s choices sheet as long as the names of the lookup columns are specified in a “parameters” column on the “survey” sheet), is not supported in Kobo.
Is this the case? Or if the feature is supported, can anyone point me to an example in Kobo so I can try to replicate if?
