Add an option to Aggregate export to CSV to remove group names in column headers

[aurdipas]

Background
When exporting a form through Aggregate to csv, variable names (column headers of the csv file) are not simply the one specified by the user on designing the form, but the eventual groups name the variable belong to, are automatically added before the actual name given to the variable.

In complex forms, with nested groups, this could lead in very long and complex names of column headers of the exported csv file.

These complex names bring complexity in the analysis and generate headache to data managers.

The reason of generating these complex names when exporting data from Aggregate is due to the XForm specs that give the possibility to have variables with same name inside different groups.

Most ODK users use XLSForms or Build to create their forms that will not allow duplicated variable names but data managers at the end need to manually (or with a specific manipulation post export) remove the group names for analysing the data. I

Forum Post

Goal

a) Add an option to Aggregate to export to csv without group names.

These option will work for forms that have been created with XLSForm and Build or with forms created manually (xml) without duplicated variable names.

In case of manually written xml files with duplicated variable names, a pop up could be shown to users after parsing the file, informing that due to duplicated variable names this kind of export can not be executed.

reference Roadmap and Briefcase