Graphical form builder for the CHT forms

Design
1

Hi community,
Has anyone tried or know of any projects to create a graphical form builder like odk’s, kobotoolbox… for CHT forms?

2

@derick @irene @wambua and team experimented in 2022 year with:

Would you guys share an update? I’m curious also to hear about your efforts.

3

THanks kenn, but i was asking a tool specific to CHT forms

4

We have been looking at improving the long term sustainability of deployments, and recognize that a major factor is having programs staff involved in updating workflows in their apps. Although there isn’t a GUI form building that will work out of the box for all the CHT features, we have a team exploring this further to see what new tools or improvements we should make for those building CHT apps, and all extra info would help.

I suspect the team will want to chat directly, but in the meantime, can you describe the intended user that will be creating or editing the forms, along with their main tasks? For instance, is it to have non-technical programs staff build forms? Is it for them to tweak or modify forms?

5

Hi @marc
Yes I was pretty sur that a working solution doesn’t exist yet, but I’d want to confirm, so my question was also to know if a developpment of such a tool, is a current on going work or not.

We’ve a team that works adapting international health protocols to country reality, we’re at this moment in two countries, Mali and Ivoiry Coast
This medical team, that is composed mainly by doctors, is the team that give to dev team the workflow to be implemented with the CHT, we use for this some diagrams, flow diagrams to communicate between developers and medical teams
In addition of this, the medical team give to the development team the forms definitions but in a “free format” in a spreadsheet with explanations about skip logic, validation rules etc

We are planning to use the kobotoolbox form builder so they can create graphically a form add the skip logic, validation rules, the choice list, cascade selects, etc and use the obtained XLSX from kobotoolbox as form definiton file for the dev team.

So I was wondering if maybe another solution that involves a graphical tool is already in progress.

Thank You

6

Thanks for the extra details. We have this situation with a lot of our projects, and have often used templates for non-technical teammates to use. I’ve seen versions of it in the past that look like a simpler XLSForm notation, that a developer can then add the formalities needed.

Would you be interested in talking to directly to some Medic teammates to share ideas?