Diseñar un formulario

En Formularios puede diseñar su propio cuestionario y después recopilar las respuestas. El formulario se diseña una sola vez y se publica; a continuación, su equipo puede completarlo dentro del espacio de trabajo, mientras que personas ajenas a su organización responden al mismo formulario desde un enlace público.

Crear un formulario nuevo

A new form begins empty. You add its questions one at a time in the builder, on the form's Design tab, or you import a whole questionnaire from an XLSForm workbook.

1. Abra Formularios desde el menú del espacio de trabajo y cree un formulario.
2. Abra el nuevo formulario y elija Diseñar.
3. Añada una pregunta, elija su tipo, complete su configuración y guárdela. Repita el proceso hasta completar el cuestionario.

Para diseñar se necesita el permiso de edición de Formularios. El diseñador se encuentra en una dirección con esta forma: /forms/<id>/build/

Los veintiún tipos de pregunta

Cada pregunta pertenece a uno de veintiún tipos, y el tipo determina tanto lo que ve la persona que responde como lo que almacena la plataforma. Elija primero el tipo, porque de él dependen cuáles de las opciones de configuración siguientes aparecen.

There is also a note, which shows text such as an instruction or a consent paragraph and records no answer.

A note can be shown with the question that follows it: when editing the note, tick Show this note with the next question. The note then appears in the same card as that question, also when the form shows one screen at a time, and a screen reader reads it out with the question. A note with a display condition of its own, a note in a repeat group, and a note followed by another note keep a card of their own.

Qué se puede configurar en una pregunta

Toda pregunta tiene una etiqueta y, si lo desea, una línea de texto de ayuda. Ambas son texto, por lo que se introducen una vez para cada uno de los idiomas de su espacio de trabajo. Aparte de eso, la configuración disponible depende del tipo elegido:

• Obligatoria, para que el formulario no avance hasta que se responda la pregunta.
• Opciones de respuesta, que se añaden y eliminan como filas. Cada fila contiene una etiqueta que lee la persona y un valor que almacena la plataforma.
• Un valor mínimo y uno máximo, para las preguntas que admiten un número.
• Etiquetas para el extremo inferior y el superior de una escala, para que una valoración diga algo más útil que un simple número.
• Un nombre de variable. Es obligatorio, debe comenzar por una letra minúscula y a continuación utilizar solo letras minúsculas, dígitos y guiones bajos, por ejemplo household_size
• Los tipos de archivo que se aceptarán, para las preguntas de carga de archivos.
• Una fórmula, para un campo calculado cuya respuesta obtiene la plataforma en lugar de preguntarla.
• Reglas de validación, incluida una expresión regular y el mensaje de error que se muestra cuando una respuesta no la cumple.
• Las filas y la escala de una matriz, los elementos que deben ordenarse en una clasificación y la pregunta principal de una selección en cascada.

Who a form belongs to, and who it is about

A form's scope says what it belongs to: one activity, or a whole project. Its respondent source says who it is about: the participants of its activity, the participants of the activity chosen at each response, a list of people you choose, an uploaded roster, or no respondent list. Once the form holds a real response, neither can change, and nor can its respondent group: the rest of the Settings page still saves, and the save says which of the three it left as they were. A form someone has opened but not yet answered holds no response.

A form with no respondent list is about nobody on a register. It opens at its first question, online and on a phone, with no search, no scan and nobody to register: use it for an anonymous survey, or for anything that is not about a person, such as market prices. Registering people from a form needs a respondent group, so a form that declares none registers nobody.

One form for many events. A form that is the same at every event, such as a training satisfaction survey, belongs to the whole project and takes the source "Participants of the activity chosen at each response". When the form opens, the collector chooses the activity, from that project's activities only, and the list of people narrows to that activity's participants. Every response keeps its activity, so one dataset carries an activity column instead of one form for each event. Offline, the activity is chosen on the phone and sent with the response.

Where a project names an operating area on its Countries tab, the place picker on a form collected for that project offers those places first, under "Where this project works", and the rest of the country after them. Nothing is hidden: every place stays available, and what you may record is unchanged. For a response collected at an activity, the order follows that activity's country.

Each response also records the country it is about: its activity's, else its respondent's, else a place answer's, else the collector's default country. It is updated whenever the response changes, and the Country column and filter on the records list use it.

Agrupar las preguntas en secciones

Select the questions that belong together, by ticking them or with a Ctrl or Cmd click, and choose Create section with selected. The section takes a heading of its own, in each of your workspace languages, and its settings open so you can decide how it behaves. Move to section adds questions to a section that already exists.

A section can show all of its questions on the same screen, it can repeat, and it can carry a condition of its own. Removing a section asks whether to ungroup it, which keeps every question and removes only the section, or to delete everything in it. Deleting questions that already hold answers asks you to confirm how many answers go with them.

Repeating a section

A repeating section asks its questions once for each entry, for example once for each child in a household. You choose how many entries there are: the person filling the form adds them as they go, a fixed number, as many as the answer to an earlier question, or as many as an expression gives. A section shown on one screen cannot contain a repeat.

A repeating section that already holds entries cannot be switched off or ungrouped, so entries that have been collected are never lost that way.

A calculation can also read a repeating section as a whole, with one of the functions below, for example how many people a roster lists, or a year of monthly revenue. To count only the entries that match a condition, such as how many of the workers are women, add a calculation inside the section that is 1 for a matching entry and 0 otherwise, and total it. The value follows the entries as they are added or removed, and is worked out again when the response is submitted.

• count() the number of entries
• sum() the total of one of its questions
• min() the smallest value of one of its questions
• max() the largest value of one of its questions
• avg() the average of one of its questions

Importing an XLSForm

A form can also be built from an XLSForm workbook, the format KoboToolbox, ODK and SurveyCTO use. Import it from the Design tab, and upload the workbook again later to update the form. The import reports anything it could not apply, names a group too long for one phone screen and any rule that reads a later question, and keeps the columns it does not interpret so that they are exported back unchanged.

Each upload that is applied is recorded with its file name, who uploaded it and when, and the workbook itself can be downloaded again. The template offered on the import page carries a GUIDE sheet that explains what the importer accepts.

Forms → Import XLSForm creates a new form, and is linked from the forms list and its empty state. To replace a form you already have and keep its responses, use Import XLSForm on that form’s own Design tab, which matches your questions by their name column and updates them in place.

The form’s title is stored in the language the workbook declares, so an English title never lands in the Arabic slot.

A workbook may carry a commonlynk sheet (its bilingual title, the register the form is about, how it is scored) and cl:: columns: one set for scoring each question, and cl::bound, which shows a note with the question after it. CommonLynk reads these and applies the ones it recognises; a value it does not recognise is reported and left for you to set, never applied silently. They are optional, so a plain Kobo, SurveyCTO or ODK file imports unchanged. Exported, a bound note is an ordinary note that keeps its cl::bound marker, so importing the file again restores it.

A pattern (regex) must check an answer the same way on the phone as on the server, so a pattern the phone cannot check is refused when the form is written: in the question editor, and when a workbook is imported, naming the question and the part of the pattern. The cases are possessive quantifiers (a++), atomic and conditional groups, \N{…}, octal escapes such as \0, and a negated escape inside square brackets such as [\D]; inside a relevant, a calculation or a constraint joined with or, inline flags such as (?i) are refused too. Rewrite the pattern without them.

A rule on a date can compare it with the day the answer is given, using the function below, so a date can be kept out of the future, or the date of a next visit kept after today. A response collected offline is checked against the day it was collected, not the day it reached the server, and a response already submitted is never checked again against a later day. If a device did not report when it collected a response, the answer is kept and flagged for review rather than refused.

• today() the day the answer is given, in the workspace's time zone

Ordenar las preguntas

Cada tarjeta de pregunta tiene un asa de arrastre. Sujétela, arrastre la tarjeta hacia arriba o hacia abajo hasta la posición deseada, y el nuevo orden se guarda en cuanto la suelta. No hay un paso de guardado aparte para el orden ni una numeración que mantener a mano.