Creating a survey from a CSV with previous data

In the Survey Designer it's possible to generate a survey starting from a CSV or Excel file.

First you have to create a new blank survey, then start to edit it and got to the top right corner where the Advanced functions are and select Import attributes from Excel/CSV file; you will be asked to specify in which entity you want to define the new attributes. The column names of the CSV file will be used to define the attribute names and Collect will try to guess the attribute type according to the content of the columns (you can convert later every attribute to a different type if needed).

Optionally you can define attribute labels in the second row of the CSV file and select the option Labels in second row before starting the import!!! This way the first row will contain the names of the attributes and the second will contain the labels (what you see in the forms)

IMPORTANT:

if you have 3 CSV files like cluster.csv, plot.csv and tree.csv that correspond to a hierarchical structure of entities cluster/plot/tree, first you have to define the entities cluster (sampling unit), plot and tree, then you can import the attributes in each of these entities.
EXAMPLE:

id,region,land_use,distance
"ID of plot","Region", "Land Use in the center of the plot", "Distance to road"
1,Umbria,Forest,10
2,Lazio,Forest,1
...

Thanks,
Open Foris Team