Accessing Choice metadata in a Forumla

[MattFoy]

Apologies if this is already a thing and I'm just being ignorant.

I noticed in the documentation under http://xlsform.org/#cascade, you can make selects filter based on "metadata" from the choices list. In the example given, you add a choice_filter column, and can set it like state=${state} and county=${county}. The "state" and "country" apparently referencing those extra metadata columns from the list of choices.

Rather than filtering, I'd like to display the full list, then merely display or perhaps reference that metadata once a selection has been made. This would be useful for a number of use cases I can think of.

I would expect to be able to access this metadata in a calculation column like ${city->county} or ${city.county} or something like that... or maybe in a relevant column like ${city}->altitude >= 1000 or ${city}.altitude >= 1000.

If this is a thing already, could you please point me towards the proper syntax?

Thanks!

[lognaturel]

You can do this! It has no special support in XLSForm but you can use XPath queries and those are just passed through to the form XML. See https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mQGVWaJA4QQp3jtddMdcRSDjc1O-j_bB79GUnlj5k10/edit#gid=0 for an example.

XLSForm/pyxform#176 would be a first step towards more native support for this.

In general, something like the ODK forum (https://forum.opendatakit.org/) will be a better place for a usage question. If there is development to be done someone can help direct you to the best repository for filing the issue! If you do have follow-up questions, it would be great if you could create a support question there so a broader range of users can benefit from the answer.

[MattFoy]

Thanks!!