Proposal: customize name and label 'columns' in selects from external data in XLSForm

[martijnr]

Good point. Would be nice to figure that out too. Thanks!

@LN

I don't find the jr:itext multi language machinery very compatible with external secondary instances because it expects all the translations to be in the form definition.

Yes, indeed.

@LN

am I forgetting a straightforward mechanism for specifying multiple language labels in an external secondary instance? This is a big thing that has kept us from moving on from search()

Nothing defined afaik, but actually Enketo does support an undocumented, rogue and forgotten method that relies on using ::nl postfixes to CSV columns or lang="nl" attributes in XML nodes. I wonder if that less flexible solution would be acceptable, as it's a very lightweight solution and I like it.

It would be exposed by a (new) translation function call. Enketo chose the function name translate¹ and it could be used in the above proposal like this:

type	parameters	name	label
select_multiple_from_file hh-data.csv	value=hh_number, label=translate(hh_name)	a	Select

resulting in the XForm output:

<itemset nodeset="instance('hh-data')/root/item">
       <value ref="hh_number" />
       <label ref="translate(hh_name)" />
</itemset>

That new XPath function would return from its node-set parameter the first XML node (including transformed CSV to XML) with a lang attribute that matches the current language.

Note:
¹ Very bad name because there is an XPath 1.0 function with that name that does something entirely different. We could use something like current-lang instead.