Can I add my personal meta tags to each field in excel as part of validation of field description?

Hey all I am totally new to ODK and I am wondering how does excel gets converted into xlsform that I can view on my browser? Or what are the steps thats been taken programmatic in order for me to see my excel fields in my form?

But the over all problem that I am trying to solve is how can I add my costume metadata into excel for each field with extra validation or parameters? The problem I am having is that I need to pass more "hidden" information about the field into API. Also I am not sure how does ODK API work and can I have access to data from there using python

Hi @Alex4!

The most popular conversion tools are XLSForm Online and XLSForm Offline. These are wrappers on pyxform, the library that does the actual conversion from XLSForm to XForms. More at https://docs.opendatakit.org/xlsform/. Viewing the form in a browser is done with Enketo.

Easiest way to do this end-to-end is to go to http://opendatakit.org/xlsform, do the conversion, and view it with Enketo.

If you want to add extra fields to the form, using calculates are your best option. See https://docs.opendatakit.org/form-question-types/#hidden-questions for more.

As to getting data out of Aggregate, https://docs.opendatakit.org/briefcase-api/ is the API for doing that. If you can provide more detail about what exactly you are trying to do, you'll likely get more targeted help.

Hi @yanokwa thank you for your reply!

Okay and if I were to set up the project locally with pyxform, can I modify code in there?
Like getting the passed in fields for example?

If I were to use calculates option, will it be possible for me to add other values to it that could look something like this:
{
name: value
}
or to something where I will know what values belong to what name. Because one of the problems is adding more rules for each field (in house rules)

Also, is OpenRosaAPI only written in Java or can I use Python or PHP for it?

Yes, you can modify the code are you see fit, but note that you will be responsible for supporting it and keeping up with the changes on the stock codebase.

Our tools are written in a variety of languages but the APIs are language agnostic.

I think at this point, your best bet is to build a simple form and see how the process works and go from there. See https://docs.opendatakit.org/getting-started for more.

Great I will look into it.

Also when I do create an excel file, is there a way to a default value from sibling_number as a constraint for another filed? Please find attached image.

Or will this be the right place where I will be using calculates?

Your form doesn't comply with the form standard. I'd encourage you to take the time to read through the resources we provide at xlsform.org and https://docs.opendatakit.org/form-design-intro

The things that jump out to me are...

  1. There is no "hidden" question type that I'm aware of. There is a "calculate".
  2. Defaults are static values to set the default answer (e.g., 20). You've put an expression.

You can constrain based on the value of a previous question. See https://docs.opendatakit.org/form-logic/#validating-and-restricting-responses for more.