Randomizing the text of a question in XLSForm

Question

I am designing a survey in XLSForm, not in Excel. I need to randomize not only the order of choices, but also the text of the questions. Some questions are made of four sentences A, B, C and D. I need them displayed in random order.

I thought of using a calculate field with a random number. But there are 24 combinations for 4 sentences and I cannot possibly make that many fields.

Did you try `=ROUND(RANDBETWEEN(0,24),0) to get that 24 combinations? — David García Bodego, Oct 19 '19 at 06:41
I cant't really use Excel functions, just XLSForm functions. — Vlad Gheorghe, Oct 20 '19 at 12:36
Ok, so you shouldn´t tag your question on Excel, right? Did you check [this](http://xlsform.org/en/#randomize-choices)? — David García Bodego, Oct 20 '19 at 12:42
Right, but I couldn't find the tag for XLSForm and I'm not allowed to create them. That function allows me to randomize choices as I wrote in OP, but not questions. — Vlad Gheorghe, Oct 20 '19 at 16:10

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 21 '19 at 18:02

I think the following approach might work.

Use question type xml-external to add an external data XML file with your 4 texts in different nodes. Call this 'mytexts' eg. The structure could be something like this:

<root>
 <text>first text</text>
 <text>second text</text>
 <text>third text</text>
 <text>fourth text</text>
</root>

In the label of your question use join(" ", randomize(instance('mytexts')/root/text))

Randomizing the text of a question in XLSForm

1 Answers1