5 CommCare Tricks from Dimagi's Field Team

On the Dimagi field team, everyone has their own CommCare tricks. These can be preferences in app design, techniques for building forms, or the way we use certain features. We are constantly sharing our experiences over Skype and email, and occasionally a Field Manager will mention a feature that almost no one else knew about. So we thought it would be fun to share some of these recent “discoveries.”

To kick things off—the Dimagi Field Team presents: 5 Awesome Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With CommCare Mobile!

1. Format text inside a form to be bold, italic, and many other styles

When you are specifying label text for any question in a form you can add formatting that will make your text easier to read. Options include bold, italics, strikethrough, different sized headers, bullet lists, numbered lists, and hyperlinks.

Find more information on this feature here.

2. Call or text a phone number from the Case List

When designing the case list and case details, you may have noticed that you can specify different “types” like date and calculation. These all help to format how the data is presented on the mobile but the format Phone Number does something extra special – it makes the phone number in the case list open up the device’s phone or text messaging app. This allows users who want to call one of their cases to just look them up in the case list and then dial.

Find more information on this feature here.

3. View the case list as a map

Are you collecting GPS data associated with your cases? If so, then you can view the case list as a map instead of a normal list. As long as there is data in the case list with the type “address” selected, you will be able to choose the “View on Map” option in the case list. Once you find the case you are looking for you can click on it to view the case details and proceed to complete a form.

Find more information on this feature here.

4. Generate QR Codes from data you collect in CommCare

Imagine you are a collecting data about a patient in CommCare, but then you need to get that data into another system. You could access the data via CommCareHQ after it was submitted, or you could manually copy over the data – or you could can just scan a QR code! You can set a CommCare question to generate a QR code from any question or case property. Then you can just scan that QR code with another device for a copy of the data.

Find more information on this feature here.

5. Integrate a breath counter or area mapper into your CommCare app

There is a special type of question in the Form Builder called an Android Callout, which can be used to pull in data from other apps. Dimagi has developed two special callout apps, which are especially easy to integrate – one for counting the number of breaths per minute for pneumonia diagnosis, and one for mapping an area. Both the breath counter and area mapper are freely available on the Google Play store and they can be integrated into CommCare projects on a Pro software plan or higher.

Find more information on this feature here.

Stay tuned for more Awesome Things You Never Knew CommCare Could Do!

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