# Use of two appearances

**URL:** <https://forum.getodk.org/t/use-of-two-appearances/9443>\
**Category:** Support\
**Tags:** form-design, odk-collect\
**Created:** [August 16, 2017, 8:53pm UTC](https://forum.getodk.org/t/use-of-two-appearances/9443 "2017-08-16T20:53:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![LN](https://getodk.b-cdn.net/user_avatar/forum.getodk.org/ln/32/1605_2.png) [@LN](https://forum.getodk.org/u/LN)\
**Post date:** [August 23, 2017, 2:57am UTC](https://forum.getodk.org/t/use-of-two-appearances/9443/3 "2017-08-23T02:57:01Z")

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@Bhupender_Bhutani I suspect you will be able to use a combination of [external itemsets](http://xlsform.org/#external) and [cascading selects](http://xlsform.org/#cascade) to achieve what you need. If that's enough information to get you on the right track, please let us know. If not, fill out the rest of the support template in your original post so that we can best help you. A sample form or a description of what you are trying to do would be very helpful along with the versions of tools that you are using.

This question turns out to unearth a lot of interesting things. First, it's not currently possible to combine the `search` appearance with others. There's an issue in Collect to address that [here](https://github.com/opendatakit/collect/issues/1137). Now that I think about it, I don't know how practical that actually is depending on the different layouts used but it will be something to look into.

Seeing this written out as the search **function** , I went back to read the section in the XLSForm spec that I linked to in the issue above and saw that what is described there has nothing to do with the `search` appearance that exists in Collect today. Some digging turned up [this page](https://opendatakit.org/help/form-design/data-preloading/) in which the "Dynamically-Loaded Multiple-Choice Data" section describes the `search` function/appearance. It looks like the search function was broken in April of 2016 with [this change](https://github.com/opendatakit/collect/commit/845c95d1655e06a42f0c13c216e894ff60f8e503). This was to introduce a way for users to search/filter a list of choices.

@mathieubossaert noticed this in June with [this issue](https://github.com/opendatakit/collect/issues/1107) but we didn't make the connection then.

I don't know exactly where this conversation should go (Development? Features? Community?) but I think we should officially deprecate the `search` function and make that clear on any documentation that mentions it. I believe that a combination of external itemsets and the `search` appearance mostly address what it was supposed to. Also, Collect hasn't supported it for almost 1.5 years and it doesn't seem like there have been many complaints. And finally, I imagine Enketo and other clients don't support it since it's an unusual use of `appearance` (@martijnr?).

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