Building App Forms

Building CHT app forms

App forms allow users to submit reports from Android devices.

This tutorial will take you through how to build App forms for CHT applications, including:

• Authoring forms in Excel, Google sheets or other spreadsheet applications.
• Converting XLSForms to XForms
• Uploading XForms to CHT

You will be building assessment workflow that allows Community Health Workers to conduct a health assessment for children under the age of 5.

Brief Overview of Key Concepts

App forms serve as actions within the app.

XLSForm is a form standard created to help simplify the authoring of forms in Excel.

XForm is a CHT-enhanced version of the ODK XForm standard.

Required Resources

You should have a functioning CHT instance with cht-conf installed locally and a project folder set up already.

Implementation Steps

Create a new spread sheet in Google Sheets or other preferred editor like Excel or LibreOffice. Name the spreadsheet assessment. The final file name should be assessment.xlsx.

Create 2 additional sheets. Rename the sheets survey, choices and settings.

1. Define XLS Survey/Form Fields

This rows are populated automatically before the form is rendered to the user. These fields are usually hidden by default but can be accessed to display certain information about the person being assessed.

Copy everything inside the table below by clicking the “📋 Copy survey sheet” button, then paste into cell A1 of a new sheet named survey in Google Sheets or your prefered editor:

type	name	label	required	relevant	appearance	constraint	constraint_message	calculation	choice_filter	hint	default
begin group	inputs	Patient		./source = 'user'	field-list						
hidden	source	Source								user
hidden	source_id	Source_ID								
hidden	task_id	Task_ID								
begin group	contact	Contact								
string	_id	Patient ID			select-contact type-person				Select a person from the list	
hidden	patient_id	Medic ID								
hidden	name	Patient Name								
begin group	parent	Parent								
hidden	_id	Family UUID								
begin group	parent	Grandparent								
hidden	_id	CHW Area UUID								
hidden	name	CHW Name								
hidden	phone	CHW Phone								
begin group	parent	Great Grandparent								
hidden	_id	CU UUID								
end group										
end group										
end group										
end group										
end group										
calculate	patient_id						../inputs/contact/_id			
calculate	patient_name						../inputs/contact/name			
begin group	group_assessment	Assessment								
select_one yes_no	cough	Does ${patient_name} have a cough?	yes							
select_one symptom_duration	cough_duration	How long has the cough lasted?	yes	${cough} = 'yes'						
select_one yes_no	fever	Does ${patient_name} have a fever?	yes							
select_one yes_no	diarrhea	Does ${patient_name} have diarrhea?	yes							
end group										
end group

2. Define the Choices

Copy everything inside the table below by clicking the “📋 Copy choices sheet” button, then paste into cell A1 of a new sheet named choices in Google Sheets or your prefered editor:

list_name	name	label
yes_no	yes	Yes
yes_no	no	No
symptom_duration	3	3 days or less
symptom_duration	7	4 - 7 days
symptom_duration	13	8 - 13 days
symptom_duration	14	14 days or more

3. Define the XLS Settings

Copy everything inside the table below by clicking the “📋 Copy settings sheet” button, then paste into cell A1 of a new sheet named settings in Google Sheets or your prefered editor:

form_title	form_id	version	style	path	instance_name	default_language
Assess patient	assessment	1	pages	data		en

4. Convert the XLSForm and Upload the XForm

Add the file to the forms/app subfolder in your project.

project-name
  forms
    app
      assessment.xlsx

To convert and upload the form to your local instance, run the following command from the root folder:

cht --url=https://<username>:<password>@localhost --accept-self-signed-certs convert-app-forms upload-app-forms -- assessment

Next steps

• Setting Form Properties

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