Soft and hard ranges

User Support Form Building
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Hi there

I am new to Kobo and looking for some help. I can’t find anything about soft/hard ranges when putting validation criteria in fields. There are always outliers in every dataset so I’m wondering if there is a way to set soft ranges e.g. 0-9 which will allow a value outside this range to be entered with a pop up saying value out of range, please check and continue (or something like that).

Many thanks for any advice!
Steve.

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Welcome to the community, @Stcamera! Could you share a dummy question and the criteria that should match for an entry? Maybe the community could then help you out with it.

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Welcome @Stcamera ,
You can use a following acknowledge type and a relevant clause (instead if a constraint for the original question = hard control).

You can also use a note, type, but the advantage of acknowledge is that the user’s confirmation (“OK”) is stored in the case data.

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Thanks! So we are collecting spirometry data on asthmatics. One of the questions is Peak expiratory flow (PEF) which is measured in litres/second. The expected range is 0.5-5.5 litres/second and I want to add this as the range. However, there will always be a few values that are outside this range. I want to be able to include these values but if I use 0.5-5.5 as the validation criteria I am not able to enter anything outside this range as it is a hard range. Is it possible to set the criteria so that the range is more of a check than a fixed limit?

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Hi, thanks for this. Do you have an example of a following acknowledge type and a relevant clause?

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type = acknowledge
label = Warning to confirm
relevant = condition for warning.

You can find more in the Help Center article Acknowledge question type — KoboToolbox documentation please.

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Thank you! I am still trying to navigate the Kobo site so this is very useful :slight_smile:

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So if I understand your issue clearly it seems like you are trying to make a constraint where you wish the enumerators to be able to enter within the range of 0.5 to 5.5. But in some circumstances, you wish to bypass this constraint. Did I get you correctly?

If this is your requirement, could you please share with us a dummy question and the criteria for when it should bypass the constraint?

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Thanks Kal

Yes, you have understood the issue correctly. The criteria for constraint is just out of range but valid result. So for example,
Peak expiratory flow (PEF) value is 8.6 but the expected (normal) range is 0.5-5.5. For some participants 8.6 is a valid but high result, and we want to include it in the dataset.