Best Practices for the Choices Sheet in an XLSForm

ThomasHamill

What are your best practices or naming conventions for the choices sheet?

Do you use CamelCase or underscores in the list_name and name columns?

How do you treat hyphens differently in the name column (equivalent to a domain code) versus the label column (equivalent to a domain description)?

Do you always use integers or acronyms/abbreviations in the name column (and if you do, why?) or is your name column entry simply an underscored or CamelCase version of what you put in the label column for that entry?

What do you do in the name column to represent a label entry that combines text and numeric attribute or value range in parenthesis? Do you simply pick one (either the number or the text component) for the name entry and use the entire string in the label entry?

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Katie_Clark

This is a really interesting question, I too would like to hear what other people have found to work best for them.

Personally, I usually use underscores in the list_name if it needs to be more than one word, which is just a habit based on my departments convention. As for Name vs. Label, it depends on if the list will be used in a select_one or select_multiple question. If it's for a select_one question, I usually make the Name and Label identical, so I don't have to worry about which version will appear in the tabular version of the data. I haven't had any issues with special characters, it seems to accept the same format. If it's for select_multiple, then I use underscores in the name since it won't allow spaces.

Also, maybe it's a holdover from other programming courses I've taken, but I almost always use lowercase letters in my coded values (list_name, name, etc).  

There are also times where the Label needs to be an entire sentence or two based on the form I'm constructing. My approach for the name varies depending on how I need the answer formatted. Sometimes, the Label will be an entire sentence but the Name is only a number. I can then use this number in calculations elsewhere in the form, since it's used as an overall score for that metric. (i.e. If the user selects the option "Less than 10% of the bottom covered by excessive sediment deposition; bars with established vegetation.", assign a score of 5.)

If I don't need to use the value in a calculation and I have many different choices, sometimes I just use acronyms and numbers. (i.e. I have a "Prescribed Burn Checklist" question in my survey, with 12 different values. The Label will usually be pretty long, but the Name will just be something like pb1, pb2, etc.)

Anyway, that's my approach. 🙂