Time to start building!
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After hitting "create" or "edit" on your form, you are inside the Form Builder. The Form Builder is Dimagi's easy-to-use interface for building CommCare forms. As mentioned in CommCare Fundamentals, once you are comfortable with the process and structure, it is possible to use other tools to create forms.
Along the left side of the screen you will see the Question Tree. Selecting the 'Add Question' button will display a list of question types that you can have in your form.
Each icon represents a category of question that you can add to your form. These questions will appear in your "Question Tree" in the order they will appear on your device. From top to bottom, these are the categories of question types:
You can hover your cursor over the question button to see the type of question it will add. Click on the drop-down next to each category to see a list of all possible question types. For more information on the From Builder and Question types see our Form Builder Help Page.
Click on 'Add Question' to add a Text question. You should see the following:
You will now see that there are two sections in the Form Builder main page:
In this tutorial we will only be concerned with the Basic and Logic sections.
Try adding any text in the Question ID and Display Text boxes (i.e. try writing "patient name" or "address")
Delete this text question by using the red delete button in the upper right-hand corner.
You cannot put just anything as a Question ID. Here are the rules:
If you violate one or more of these rules, you'll get a warning message! Try it! In addition, we can suggest some best practices for Question IDs:
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Let's start adding questions to this form.
This will create a text question, wherein the user will see a box and a full keyboard to type alphanumeric text. It should look like this in the form builder:
You can ignore everything that is not in this "Basic" section.
Question ID is what the data will look like when viewing the form submission. The mobile user WILL NOT see the question ID, only people look at the data will. If you are going to use a data analysis package, you may want to consider what format of the Question ID will be easiest for your software to process. Display Text is the text that the mobile user will see. If you have more than one language in your application you will have labels for each language, but the same Question ID. You can have any type of special character (or non-English text) in a Label. |
Here's how the question will look on CommCare for Android:
Easy, right?
Double check it:
Here's how it is going to look on the phone:
Look at the question tree- now we have two questions, "Woman's Name:" and "Village Name:". Let's say we want to put "Village Name:" as the first question. You will click on "Village Name:" in the Question Tree, and then drag it above "Woman's Name:". There is a small bar that will show where the question is going to be inserted and you will also see a green check mark. It will look like this:
Everything is the same as when you added a text question, just the question type is different!
You can change the question type using the dropdown menu in the upper left corner of the Question Properties box. The questions are indicated by the same icons as in the Question Bar. |
Here's how this question will look on the phone (note that calendar questions may differ depending upon phone models):
Now comes a new type of question- the Multiple Choice question. We are going to ask a "yes or no" question- whether or not the woman previously gave birth.
This means we need to add three things:
To do that, click on the "Add Question" question button in the Question tree to add a question. Make sure you choose the Multiple Choice option (Careful! We want a single answer question rather than a checkbox question). By default, no display text, question ID or choices are added with a multiple choice question. Let's change that!
Click on the multiple choice question (the blank question displayed in the image above) and fill out the Display Text and Question ID:
However, we also need to add choices to the question. Select 'Add Choice' button and you will see something similar to what you have seen for other questions. By default, there are no choices, so let's press the button twice to add two:
The Choice Value is similar to the Question ID - this is how the data will be coded; the Display Text is the text that the user will see.
Set the first one to:
And the second choice:
It will look like this:
Here is how this question will appear on the phone:
This next two questions will be easy again. We want to add two number questions. Because we only want to count whole numbers of children (1, 2, 3) and not decimals (1.4, 2.5) we will use integer questions.
Click on 'Add Question,' followed by the 'Number' question type to add the integer questions.
The first one should look like this:
And then make a second question like this:
How does it look?
Here's how it will look on the phone:
Almost done with the first part!
Add another Multiple Choice question:
Then add two choices:
The last thing we want to add is a screen that does not ask for any information, but only provides a written message to the mobile user. We want to remind her to tell the pregnant woman to go to the clinic.
To add a label you will need to click on the 'Add Question' button to open the menu and select the Label question type:
Then set the main properties as follows:
You're done adding questions! Here is what your Question Tree should look like:
You've got a beautiful form! But before we go too far we should test the form. It's important to test your form frequently so you can catch mistakes early. Fortunately, CommCare has a built in tool for form testing that doesn't even require a phone.
Note that your followup forms must have at least one question before we can test them using the tools described in the next section. Likely, one of your followup forms was pre-populated with a label. Check your second followup form, if there are no questions on it, add one label (it can simply be called, 'placeholder') which can be deleted later when populating the form with further detail.
Go on to the next section, Part 4.