I am working with survey tools and currently have a questionnaire developed in CommCare (XForm/XML format/.JSON). I would like to migrate this form to KoBoToolbox, which uses the XLSForm (Excel) format.
What is the simplest and most efficient way to convert or transfer the questionnaire between these two formats? Are there any recommended tools, scripts, or workflows to automate this process while preserving question types, labels, and choice lists? (Currently using python script to convert in .json format)
Any guidance, best practices, or tools you’ve used for similar migrations would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance!
Welcome back to the community, @meetthkaer! Is your main goal to upload your project data that is in CommCare to KoboToolbox?
In theory, it is not 100% possible to directly translate any XForm into a XLSForm [that is to say, there a instances where a hand-written XForm cannot be directly translated but would require some additional manual renaming and restructuring]. However, in almost all cases a direct conversion should be possible, although I’m not aware of any tools that I can reliable recommend for this purpose. Typically you go the other way - XLSForm to XForm - which is precisely what pyxform does wonderfully.
Depending on how large your form is, it is not too hard to do the mapping manually, once you understand the XForm syntax. Otherwise, you could try throwing it at an AI, but YMMV… you Should carefully check the resulting XLS is in fact precisely correct before deploying it to collect serious data. For example, you could put an AI’s XLSForm back thru pyxform and then compare the resulting XForms are near identical.
1 Like
