New KoBoForm feature: Repeating Groups

[Neil Hendrick]

We've added a great feature to KoBoForm, the ability to create easy repeating groups. This is a feature that you can use when you need a block of questions to repeat some number of times. A good example is if you are surveying households and you want to ask a set of questions of each person in the house. You can't know how many people are in the house, so it has to be flexible and allow you to add any number. You add household members one at a time, asking the same set of questions, like Age, Gender, and Income. You can stop the repeating when you run out of household members.

It's a great feature and has been requested a lot. Previously you had to edit the XML by hand, but now all this is automated in KoBoForm. This feature is now live on the public KoBoForm at http://www.kobotoolbox.org/koboform/. We've been testing it in Beta, but it looks good, so please take a swing at it and make some repeating groups.

How To create a Repeating Group in a survey using KoBoForm.

To create a repeating group in your survey, open KoBoForm and create a new survey.

1. Add questions that you want to appear before the repeating section. You can always change the order of questions later.
2. Now add a Group. You will find the option in the "Add Questions" drop down menu. You may have to scroll down towards the bottom.
3. Name your group. Something like "Household members"
4. Now add a repeat section, again from the "Add Questions" drop down menu.
5. Name your repeat section, something like "Household member". This will be used in when collecting data to prompt the user, "Do you want to add a new 'Household member'?".
6. Now insert all the questions that you want to repeat for each member of the household. For example, Age, Gender, and Income. The same rules apply as any normal questions, you can change the question type, add skip logic, validation, etc.
7. To exit the group, but continue adding questions (non-repeating questions) to your survey, you need to select a question in your active survey that is outside of the group. Then, when you add a question, it will be added outside the group, at the end of the survey. Of course, questions outside of the group will not repeat. 
   
8. Save your survey to browser, or save it to your desktop and move it to your Android device for testing.
   

It's as easy as that. Your testing and feedback will be much appreciated, let us know how you do with Repeating Groups. If you run into trouble, post to the list. You can also find these instructions in the KoBo User Guide.

~Neil Hendrick

KoBo Developer

[Dustin Locke]

Neil,
I am using the new repeat feature, and I can not get the skip logic to work on the questions within the question repeat thread. Is there something that I am missing? I followed the instruction to the letter, and I am still finding that the questions are not given as an option. When I try to manually enter the question in the new condition thread it gives me an error message that it is not a valid question.