Hi John,

Thanks for that explanation - I seem to have that working successfully. Can I extend the question to how it's done if you want a text box rather than a term to appear i.e. the person chooses 'Other' and then has to type the explanation in to a text input?

Cheers,
Fiona

Thanks Jim, I'll have a go at your suggestion and see how I get on.
Fiona

Hi Juergen,

One term list may be used by many custom attributes.
One custom attribute may be used by many surveys.
Each custom attribute may be configured independently for each survey.
Each form shows the custom attributes, according to their configuration, for one survey.

Therefore, I think the answer to your question is yes. You can use the same term list and the same custom attribute and show it as check boxes in one survey form and a select on another survey form.

However, I am not entirely sure what you will see if you have a hierarchical term list and then choose not to use a hierarchical_ select control. I think you get just the top level terms.

Give it a try and let us know.

Jim Bacon.

Well, that was the other likely possibility!

Before I go further, my recommendation is that your data model should represent the data you are collecting as clearly as possible. I have a plan to enable you to use one termlist. However, choose that option if it is a good data model, not just to save a bit of effort setting up attributes ;-)

I have created a hierarchical termlist and here is a snippet from the termlists_terms table of the database.

--------------------------------------------
| id   | termlist_id | term_id | parent_id |
|------|-------------|---------|-----------|
| 4827 | 362         | 4876    |           |
| 4828 | 362         | 4877    |           |
| 4829 | 362         | 4878    |           |
| 4830 | 362         | 4879    |           |
| 4831 | 362         | 4880    | 4827      |
| 4834 | 362         | 4883    | 4828      |
| 4835 | 362         | 4884    | 4828      |
| 4836 | 362         | 4885    | 4827      |
| 4837 | 362         | 4886    | 4827      |
--------------------------------------------

It is one termlist (termlist_id = 362)
It has 9 terms (each with a term_id)
Each has an id in the termlist_terms table which can appear in the parent_id column.
4827 is the parent of 3 children and 4828 is the parent of 2 children.

I conclude that the select chooses all terms with termlist_id = 362.
If we can add an extra filter, where parent_id is null, then it will only select the top level items.

I can add options to controls on the form in the Form Structure of the User Interface section (assuming you are using Drupal and the Sample with Occurrences form or similar). I happen to know that I can include additional database filters in the extraParams option. After a bit of digging I found a null value is a special case which is passed as a sting of 'NULL'

Thus, for my custom attribute (which happens to be a sample attribute with id of 571) I can insert my custom attribute and pass it an option as follows:

[smpAttr:571]
@extraParams={"parent_id":"NULL"}

This limits the select to just the top level items as desired.

Congratulations if you understood all that!

Jim Bacon.