Day 1

Get Ready

Please make sure that you have completed CommCare Fundamentals and App Building

Survey

Please complete the Day 1 Survey here!

Sessions

1A - Overview and Introduction

1B - App and Form Builder Review - Module will review the app and form builder, highlighting key points including advanced functionality and features that participants may not be aware of.

1C - Advanced use of Hidden Values, Logic, and Calculations - Module will cover advanced use of display logic, hidden values, calculations, and validation conditions to a CommCare application.

[Will Reschedule] 1D - Lookup Tables - Module will cover how to create and update lookup tables, and use them in a CommCare form.

1E - Repeat Groups - Module will introduce the repeat group question type, including common use cases and sample syntax.

Key References and Documentation

1A - Overview and Introduction

Presentation

1B - App and Form Builder Review

Documentation:

• Form Builder - all of the subpages are relevant as well
• Application Settings
• Language Configuration for Apps
• Multimedia in CommCare Apps
• CommCare Android Advanced Formatting
• Building Forms in Excel

1C - Advanced use of Hidden Values, Logic, and Calculations

Presentation

Documentation:

• Common Logic and Calculations
• CommCare Functions

[Moved to Day 3] 1D - Lookup Tables

Documentation:

• Lookup Tables Overview

1E - Repeat Groups

Presentation

Documentation:

• Repeat Groups in the Form Builder
• Repeats in Form Exports

Practice Suggestions

Here are some ideas for ways to practice some of the concepts that were covered today.

CommCare Functions

Easy Challenges:

1. You have a checkbox question about what symptoms a sick person has. The second-to-last option is “other”. You then have a text question where they can explain “other”. What is the display condition on the checkbox question?
2. You calculate the total_percent for a checklist. The competency rating is “Competent” for scores above 80%, “Competent, but needs Improvement” for scores above 50%, and “Not Competent” for scores below 50%. What is the calculation for competency_rating?
3. The group ID for a group of farmers in your project starts with the first letter of the District name and then has 3 numeric digits after. That is saved to group_number. What is the calculation for the full ID?

Moderate Challenges:

1. The project uses ID numbers of the format 123456/78/9. You don’t want people to have to type the “/” character, so you ask for the ID number without slashes and then add the slashes in a calculation. What is the calculation?
2. Some patients for your project know their date of birth but some don’t. Allow the CHW to enter dob or age as applicable. The app should calculate and save both dob and age from that.
3. For a project, the CHWs are supposed to re-visit their patients after making a referral to ensure that the patient went to the health facility. The follow up date is 1 day later for urgent referrals and 10 days later for non-urgent referrals. There is no follow-up date if no referral was made (either because no referral was necessary or because the patient refused a referral). What is the calculation for the follow_up_date?

Hard Challenges:

1. You have several follow-up dates possible for a patient (malnutrition_follow_up_date, vaccination_follow_up_date, illness_follow_up_date). Some or all of them may be blank. What is the calculation for the next_follow_up_date for this patient?
2. You automatically generate a random uuid() to use as an id number. To make sure that people are accessing the correct case, you want to generate a single, capital letter to associate with this uuid(). You’d like to use Q, W, R, T, V, and P as your options, and for each letter to be associated with a roughly equal proportion of uuids. How do you write the question that takes a uuid as input and generates a letter as its output?
3. Given a text input box for a name, validate that there are no more than 4 names given, that the first letter of each name is capitalized, that no other characters are capitalized, and that the only characters used are ‘, -, and a-z.

Lookup Tables

Try designing a set of lookup table that will allow a user to select certain foods and then save the caloric information. First they should look at a list of types of foods (grains, dairy, etc.), then the follow up question will ask about specific foods. Then hidden values in the form will record the calories associated with that food.

Practice Project Space

Most of the demos from this training will be conducted in the project called crs-training

You can request access by going to https://www.commcarehq.org/a/crs-training/ and clicking on the green "Request Access to CRS Training" button (or email Jeremy at jwacksman@dimagi.com to be manually added).