Piping into a drop-down list for repeating instruments - Help!

[Inbal Fuchs]

Hello all,

I am designing a project for a clinical database.

I am using the repeating instrument option that works very well for me so far, however I ran into some difficulty piping data from repeating instruments.

My project contains an instrument with a lot of branching options, so some of the fields will appear only in specific instruments -

For example, one of my instruments is called "surgery" in which I enter all the surgical data of a patient (1 instrument per procedure, sometimes up to 10 procedures per patient).

One of the fields is called "specimen pathology ID Number" (which is a textbox field), but only some of the procedures will result in a pathology specimen, so some of the repeating instruments will not have that field at all.

On another instrument in the same project, I'm collecting all the pathological data of a patient (one instrument per sample) in which the first field is "specimen pathology ID Number"  that I want to pipe from the instrument "surgery" as a drop-down list.

The problem is that when I am trying to pipe the values into the drop-down list, I have to insert the instance number of my repeating instrument -

[specimen pathology ID Number][1]

[specimen pathology ID Number][2] ect

(1 and 2 being the  instance number of the repeating instrument "Surgery")

but it is different for every patient (since some of them don't contain that field), so I am trying to find a way to do that without inserting the instance number, so the program will be able to recognize the relevant instances from the repeating instrument.

Do you have any idea how I can do That?

Hope I was clear enough...

Thanks,

Inbal.