Zottle

Create your first form

A form is the questionnaire your field team fills in — in the browser or in KoboCollect. Design it in the Form Studio, publish it as a version, then collect.

Before you start

You need a project first — see Create a project. Managing forms requires an admin, manager or owner account on the workspace, or the analyst role on the project.

Tip

Import an existing XLSForm to convert a questionnaire you already have instead of rebuilding it.

Create the form

  1. Open the Form Studio and choose New form.
  2. Alternatives: From Template starts from the Template Library; Import accepts an XLSForm file or a pasted survey document.
  3. In the dialog, click Create & open builder. The form itself is created when you save it for the first time.
  4. In the builder, give the form a title, then add questions from the Library: Standard Types (built-in question types) or My Library (questions your workspace saved with Save to Library).

The builder has five panels: Canvas, Library, Logic, Preview and Settings. Use Preview to answer the form the way a respondent would; Settings holds the form options, such as whether anonymous submissions are allowed.

Save and publish

Save draft keeps a working copy in your browser. A draft is local — publish a version to make it permanent.

Publish version stores the current content as a new form version — the exact XForm that collection runs on. On a brand-new form, this first publish creates the form itself. Every published version also gets a deployment row, disabled until you deploy it.

Review every version under Versions & deployment on the form page.

Submit for approval

A new form starts as a Draft. In the form details, the Approval Workflow block offers Submit for approval — possible once the form has a saved version whose questions are all labelled. The status becomes Pending approval.

An administrator then Approves — this publishes the form and makes that version live — or Rejects with a reason, which returns the form to Draft so you can fix it and submit it again.

Deploy test or live

Collection runs on the version marked live. From the version list: Deploy to test validates the questionnaire in pre-production, Deploy to live starts real collection, and Disable retires a deployment.

Only one version is live at a time — deploying a new version live retires the previous one. Only published, live versions are served to browser links and to the field apps.

Next steps