CommCare – Instance Syntax to Search for All Child Cases of a Parent

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I have an app that uses a 'household' parent case and 'member' child case. Within the 'member' visit form I want to be able to search for the # of other child cases indexed to that parent who meet a certain criteria:

In english: How many other child cases are indexed to this patient with the property mm_is_in_tb_treatment = 'yes'?

Instance path:

instance('casedb')/casedb/case[@case_type='household']/ ...

and then I'm not sure how to specify this 'member' case's 'household', then filter for child cases of this household, then filter for

/mm_is_in_tb_treatment = 'yes'

Once I get the instance syntax correct, what is the output? I need the total # cases that meet that criteria.

Best Answer

I'm assuming in this case that you've loaded a the member case into your form, and that you can load the member case ID id into

/data/member_id

What you want to get is:

The count of all member cases which are children of this case's parent, for which the member case has the property mm_is_in_tb_treatment = 'yes'

For now we can create a new hidden value to store the parent household's case ID, since it'll make understanding the full query below easier.

New hidden value: /data/parent_id:

instance('casedb')/casedb/case[@case_id = /data/member_id]/index/parent

All cases which are children of that parent would be referenced as:

instance('casedb')/casedb/case[index/parent = /data/parent_id]

You can now add your new filter directly to the end of that statement and introduce the count

count(instance('casedb')/casedb/case[index/parent = /data/parent_id][mm_is_in_tb_treatment = 'yes']

If you wanted, you could further specify that you (for safety) only want to include children that are member cases and which are open. You can also collapse back the parent ID reference if you want a one-line expression:

count(instance('casedb')/casedb/case[@case_type='member'][@status='open'][index/parent = instance('casedb')/casedb/case[@case_id = /data/member_id]/index/parent][mm_is_in_tb_treatment = 'yes']

Related Solutions

CommCare – How to Filter Instances by Case Property

If you're filtering cases, you want an expression that ultimately returns a set of cases. The first part of the expression, instance('casedb')/casedb/case, gives you all cases on the phone.

The expressions in square brackets then filter the cases by case type, parent (you're limiting to cases that are children of the "current" case, which is the one you selected from the case list), and open/closed.

[@case_type='Indicators']
[index/parent=current()/@case_id]
[@status='open']

The /[contractions_dur = 'low'] is what's throwing the error. The / says to go another level deep, but I suspect what you want is to just add the contractions_dur as a fourth constraint, on the same level as the others. So try dropping the slash: instance('casedb')/casedb/case[@case_type='Indicators'][index/parent=current()/@case_id][@status='open'][contractions_dur = 'low']

CommCare – How to Automatically Close Child Case When Parent Case is Closed

It actually is possible to set up automatic child case closure based on the parent case closing, it just takes a few steps, and isn't exactly immediate:

1) when closing the parent case, set the case property close_case = 'yes'

2) go to the Data tab > automatically close cases, and set a new rule for the child case type with the filter parent/case_close = yes. You will have to specify the # of days after which the case should close if it hasn't been updated. Select the minimum (which I believe is 30). This means that when the parent case closes, the child case will close 30 days later.

3) to make sure these cases don't appear in your case lists, set the case list filter parent/close_case != 'yes' and/or close_case != 'yes' depending on the case type of the module.

It's a bit of a work around, but in the eye of the user, those cases will be gone as soon as the parent is closed, and on the back end, they'll be closed in 30 days.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

CommCare – How to Filter Instances by Case Property

CommCare – How to Automatically Close Child Case When Parent Case is Closed

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