XLSPlay: edit & preview XLSforms in one browser tab

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Hi everyone :wave:

First time poster but long-time admirer of the ODK project here!

Sharing my summer (winter here really) side project to make editing XLSForms easier. It's a web app where you can edit and preview forms in one tab, with:

  • Ability to upload an existing .xlsx, and download back to .xlsx when done
  • A menu to add questions / groups / repeats if you forgot their syntax
  • Autocomplete for question types & question names
  • Colour highlighting for groups and repeats

See video demo below:

Try it at https://xlsplay.rapha.dev/. It's a first prototype, would be happy to get candid feedback from yall.

Thanks!

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That is super! Are there any limitations, eg select from csv, media.

It would really help speed up form authoring, finding errors/previewing rapidly and not doing a bunch of editing and then uploading over and over fixing one validate error at a time

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Thanks for the kind words!

Yes indeed, the main limitation is that it doesn't support attachments, be it media files or external csv/xml choices.

I'm using the Enketo /preview endpoint, which I think doesn't support attachments (@LN can correct me if wrong), so this would be tricky to add.

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This is so cool, I have been dreaming about something like this :heart:

Few ideas / wishlist:

  • Can you make it auto reload the preview when user make changes to the Form?
  • Add another preview button to preview the Form with latest Web Forms
  • I see you are using handsontable, its license seams quite restrictive to me. If you could replace it with something with more liberal licence like Jspreadsheet-ce then this thing can become something big down the road. Maybe becomes part of Central - not promising anything but I would love this to be inside Central and primary way to design/edit Forms.
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Not to hijack this thread but I really liked this project and decided to build something similar but more "document" oriented. It is a less powerful/complete version of this that i use for quick prototyping when offline. Still a WIP but publicly hosted at https://forms.rsearch.dev/ if anyone wants to try it out

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