Preloading with an option of new Entry

Support
2

Hi @Abigaba,

A warm welcome to the ODK community! Please take a moment to introduce yourself. Please also use a photo of yourself as an Avatar, it will help build community.

So you have a list of preloaded information, and you want to be able to add new information to that list, to grow the list. In other words, to use a form to see what information is missing and fill it in, but have the newly filled in information available in the form next time?

I don't quite understand this part of your questions:

I tried adding questions, but they all appeared for all that were selected in the preloaded which made double entries.

This might be a good use case for Entities.
Your preloaded information could be represented as Entities, and then a form could both load information from the Entity List (exactly the same way it would load information from a CSV) but it could also create Entities that get added to the Entity List.

I just created this example form that loads information from an Entity List and also creates Entities in that list.
Create New Entities.xlsx (455.7 KB)

There are two downsides to this approach, though, but we are currently working on new features in Central and Collect to address these issues.

  1. If you have information already in a CSV, there is not an easy way to get this information into Central as new Entities. We are working on creating Entities from CSV files in the upcoming release of Central, which should be ready in the next few months. (In the mean time, it is possible to add Entities individually though the Central API, but this is more technically involved.)

  2. The flow described above, of adding new entries and their details, currently only works when the device is online (or can come back online between submissions). The submission that describes a new entry has to be uploaded to Central, where it will create a new Entity, and then the Entity List has to be re-downloaded to the device for the new information to be visible. This is possible now, but in the future, Offline Entity Creation/Updates will also be possible.