Lookup Tables

This feature requires a CommCare Software Plan

This feature (Lookup Tables) will only be available to CommCare users with a Standard Plan or higher. For more details, see the CommCare Software Plan page.

CommCareHQ allows you to define Lookup Tables that can be used in your forms for information that changes over the lifetime of your application, or is different for each user.   Here are some examples of potential functionality that can be added with lookup tables:

  1. Filtered Choices: Filtering the choices of a Single or Multiple Answer question based on the answer to the previous question.  For example, if the user chooses State in one question, the next question will only show the Districts in that state. This is useful for drilling down into different locations.
  2. User Specific Choices: Providing a set of choices for a question that are specific to the logged in user.  For example, in a referral form, you may only want to show the list of referral sites that a particular user is responsible for. 
  3. Randomized Questions/Messages:  Choosing a random question or message for a user from larger set.  For example, you can define a bank of knowledge questions in a lookup table and randomly choose to ask or show one of those each time a form is opened. 

Note 1: This functionality depends on having a user logged in and hence won't work in demo mode. 

Note 2: To update lookup tables on the phone over time, you need to turn on "Two Way Sync".  This will add a "Sync" menu on Java phones.

The following pages will help you get started with using Lookup Tables:

  1. Creating and Updating Lookup Tables
  2. Setup a Question with Filtered Choices
  3. Using Lookup Tables with Multiple Languages
  4. Setup a Form to Display a Random Question from Lookup Table
  5. Calculate a Z-Score in a Form
  6. Excel tricks for Lookup Tables

 

Need help setting up your first look-up table in Excel? Download this sample to get started.