Unsupported ODK Form Types

[Hamsterarsch]

Expected behavior

All ODK forms should have appropriate GUI elements in the Tella app.

Actual behavior

Some questions have no sensible way of being answered because they only show a text input field when the question appears in the form fill view. Among them are:

1. Date+Time (in a single question), although they are supported (on my devices) when they are asked in separate questions.
2. "Point" type questions (e.g. select a point on a map).
3. Other map based questions (Line on a map, area on a map)
4. Potentially, range based questions (see Cannot fill forms with "Range" questions #438)

Steps to reproduce the problem

1. Connect to an ODK server (tested with eu.kobotoolbox.org)
2. Create a new project and add a question of each mentioned type (except 4 because then the form won't even open in Tella)
3. In tella, connect to kobotoolbox and fill the form

Additional information

This seems like a quite fundamental feature. Since tella with kobotoolbox is the only tool for my usecase I found (offline fill, able to create new surveys on mobile), I might be able to contribute a PR if needed.

Tested on android 13 with two different devices.

[carohadad]

Hi @Hamsterarsch,

Yes, I'd love to explore making these improvements. Just in case you didn't see it, we documanted here the type of questions we support in Tella and in here.

I totally agree that it would be extemelly helpful for the community support more question types and features. And I also agree with you that we can show better error messages to let user know about which question types are supported.

However our team capacity and funding is reduced (we shared more details about our current finantial situation here) . I'd love to meet with you and exploring the possibility of your contribution to the project! Our team can support you in doing so!

Talk soon,
Caro

[Hamsterarsch]

good to know - now that you linked it, I realize I did not read to the end on the odk section and just started testing. Perhaps having a disclaimer early on the odk page that support is partial would be nice (not super important in the grand scheme of things).

In terms of a meeting, let me take a look at the code first to get a better idea of things first.

[Hamsterarsch]

Todo for question types. Ordered by; how likely to be used, ease of implementation. Bold = interesting for me and might work on some PR's for it.

• Range (see Range question support #471)
• Date & time (combined, exist separately already)
• Line
• Area
• Barcode / QR Code
• Question Matrix
• Hidden
• Calculate
• External XML