What is the general goal of the feature? To allow more control over how variable names appear in the data after being submitted. Currently, the file name and the group name are automatically added before the actual name given to the variable. It would be good to be able to turn off file name prefix…

Starting in Central v1.4, it's possible to specify that group names should be removed when doing a CSV export. OData consumers such as PowerBI or Excel also provide this option when expanding groups.

@notaplatypus Thanks for the feature request. When you get a chance, please introduce yourself here . I'd also encourage you to add a real picture as your avatar because it helps build community! @ggalmazor I could have sworn we had discussed adding this to Briefcase and Aggregate, but I can't find …

I vaguely remember some conversation about group name prefixes on field names with @Matthew_White , maybe? I'm guessing that the form @notaplatypus is using has a root group called household_survey and that's why all the fields are being prefixed with that in the exported file. Could you confirm thi…

[image] ggalmazor: Even though tools like Validate prevent it, my interpretation of the XForm specs is that there's really no limitation on this particular thing. There is nothing in the XForms spec that requires instance node names be unique across the entire XML instance tree. Indeed doing …

Thanks for the replies everybody. I should have mentioned this before: I'm speaking only from experience building an XLSForm, then converting to XML, entering data with Collect and then submitting to Google Sheets. I've not tried Briefcase or Aggregate before and I'm not familiar enough with XML to …

Welcome @notaplatypus ! Am I right that you're suggesting the following two changes? The option to remove filenames and group names from the data The ability to use the same name for two fields in two different groups For (2), like @ggalmazor , I'd been working under the assumption that this was a…

[image] Matthew_White: do you think it'd be possible to remove this restriction from XLSForms? That may be tricky, because in XLSForm ${bar} refers to the question with id="bar", irrespective of whether "bar" is actually a question under a group called "foo". And you cant say something like $…

@Matthew_White thanks for your reply. For change (2) that you mentioned, I don't typically encounter this use case as it's my own practice to assign unique names to all fields. It was brought up as a situation in which the group prefix would be helpful in making all variable names in the data export…

Thank you, @notaplatypus ! When I look at the data in the Google sheet you linked to, I can see that all column headers have the prefix household_survey_2018-09-13. When I look at the XML, there are no groups with the name household_survey_2018-09-13, but the name (not the id attribute) of the child…

[image] Matthew_White: @LN , do you think it'd be possible to remove this restriction from XLSForms? Agreed with @Xiphware that this is one of the important simplifications that makes XLSForms easier for users. I don't see any reason to remove it. [image] Matthew_White: Perhaps XLSForm Of…

[image] LN: @LN , do you think it'd be possible to remove this restriction from XLSForms? Agreed with @Xiphware that this is one of the important simplifications that makes XLSForms easier for users. I don't see any reason to remove it. That sounds good to me. I'm convinced that there are n…

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Allow more control over variable-naming syntax

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