Child Forms

Child forms (previously referred to as sub-forms) are an integral feature of building effective surveys. They allow you to build nested (relational) data structures so that you can maximise the efficiency of your data collection in the field.

A typical example of a survey using parent and child forms is a breeding bird survey. In this survey you want to collect the survey metadata, such as the project name, weather and date just once. This ‘one off’ data will be recorded in the parent form. You then want to add bird sightings as they occur. These will be added as child records.

Each child record is associated with the parent record, so that the data can be combined in Excel when needed.

Form Builder

The image below shows the structure of this survey in the form builder. We’ve highlighted the child form question and how it appears within the context of the parent form.

Note – As of March 2025, child forms are now added and edited in-line with the parent form. If you have previously built surveys in Coreo, note that you can no longer create parent level forms and add these as child forms.

App

The following image shows how this parent and child form structure appears in the Coreo app and how multiple ‘child’ records can be added to the ‘parent’ record. Not repeating the parent form data per record provides the field recorder with much greater efficiency.

Data

Finally, here is an example of the two datasets as they would export from Coreo (parent records and child records) and how they relate to one another. The top image shows the parent data and below it, the child data. You can see that the highlighted 5 species records contain the same ‘Parent Id’ number, which link them to their parent survey metadata record.

Working with relational data

Where the data you export from Coreo follows the example shown above (i.e. it is linked/relational) you will probably need to use a system to combine the data at some point e.g. for producing reports. Most people have access to Excel and so that tends to be the default tool used for this purpose. We have put together a walkthrough of how to use Excel’s VLookup. There are many resources, including video tutorials, available online which look at this subject and also cover other techniques and tools you might like to use, and we recommend you also refer to those.