After programming and testing forms succesfully, the field team reported that sometimes questions don't show up when they should. However, I checked many times but everything under 'relevant' is correct, moreover I tested the forms and they work correctly for me.
Trying it a few times, I notice that also on my tablet sometimes whole questions or groups are skipped. But when I start the form over (without changing anything or even without re-running it through xlsform), it suddenly works perfectly again, or other questions are missing. Basically I never know what will happen, but often things are missing and we can't have that in the field. I'm a hundred percent sure now that it is not faulty programming.
I am programming in excel, using xlsform offline and odk collect --> latest versions.
Has anyone encountered this problem as well? What can it be? Is it because my forms are very long?
Thanks for the quick reply. I didn't want to attach the form yet because of confidentiality etc. I was just wondering if, assuming that I've programmed this correctly, this is a common problem.
I might have already found a solution myself though: it seems that when I remove all files in the ODK folder (forms, metadata, instances) and only then move the updated forms (xml files) there, everything works fine. Is it possible that after testing a draft form, changing it and replacing the older xml file with the newer xml file, something that has remained from the older one remains that confuses the logic of the newer form?
Your description seems very odd to me and I've never noticed such a strange behavior so it's hard to say anything here. Dos your form contain external csv files?
There is a machine-parsed version of the form that is cached alongside the XML source on first form open. It is possible that is not being rebuilt and that could explain the behavior you describe. How are you transferring the forms to the device -- from a server or through adb? If from a server, which one? Are you updating the version between edits? Are your edits only related to relevance? My wild guess is that you're using a server other than Aggregate that does not require you to change the version when making changes to the form and that Collect doesn't know that it has changed and that it needs to rebuild the cached version.