Hello Sanjeevi,
In taking a look at the XLSForm it seems that the labels were not formatted text even though they looked like they were.
When I would double click on the label it would pop to the right-hand side of the cell indicating they were numeric. In a separate column I had used the function =TEXT(<cell>,"0") to convert the numbers into integers. Documentation link.
I then copied the text cells and pasted them back into the column they were supposed to be and they worked as expected.
For your second question, the documentation says "External selects are designed to work with choice lists associated with a cascading select only. Only choices with an applied choice filter will be added to the itemsets.csv file."
This means that external selects are designed to work in conjunction with cascading selects. The external_choices tab is not invoked until there is at least one select_one question with a choice_filter.
Please use James's comment here for reference: https://community.esri.com/thread/214070-external-select-lists#comment-768979
What I had done to modify your survey was to move the villagename choice list to the choices tab but kept the plot number choices on the external_choices list.
I then saw an issue where the plotnumber question was grey and did not have any choices. This was because in the same documentation linked above in the cascading selects section it says that values used in the name field of the choices sheet must be text and not numeric.
I had changed the name of the villagename choices to a,b,c,d,e for example and once I did that the form worked as expected. Please find attached a copy of the XLSForm.
Thank you,
Zach
Thank you,
Zach