Auto-populate a drop down based on submitted data

Question

I have been working on created surveys for 2 types of insect collection. Each insect will have one survey form for a trap establishment and another survey for trap inspection. For the trap inspection surveys, is there a way to have a drop down menu for the site name that is updated automatically every time someone establishes a trap? This way if they go back to a site to inspect a trap, all they need to do is select the site name from a drop down versus typing in the site name every time they do an inspection?

JohnHasthorpe · Answer

Hi Claire, pulldata essentially does a lookup against a .csv so is not the function you need.

In your case, all you need is a select_one question (with appearance set to minimal).

If you want to add new site names, all you need to do is to add new rows (site names) into the choices tab of your survey and republish. This will not result in any loss of data.

I have attached an example.

This should get you on the right track

Sitenames.xlsx

luckachi · Answer

Johnathan, I have been trying to get the pulldata () function to work but I keep encountering an error. Is it possible to use a csv to populate a drop down for a text field? Also, is it possible to have the pulldata() function work if the csv only has 1 column listing out all the site names?

I am quite lost

luckachi · Answer

Thank you Johnathan!

I did have a question about the republishing, I know sometimes when I modify the survey, it says that you may loose data - if I were to go the pull data route and update the csv file every now and again, as long as that is the only thing that gets changed, would this cause any issues with republishing the survey for the users or any loss of data?