Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to survey builder module

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7: Response to survey builder module (response to 1)
Posted by Buddy Dennis on 08/14/01 09:55 PM
Hello everyone, The primary authors of the Survey Builder module are Avni Khatri, Khy Huang , and myself. We have continued to build systems that rely on Survey Builder, but we haven't ported to OpenACS4.0, yet. We have recently developed a couple of sites (ACS3.4.10) that required new functionality from Survey Builder , and now that those development projects are pretty much under control, we will begin to port to OpenACS4.0.

We will take this opportunity to redo some things in Survey Builder that have bothered us for some time. We would like to understand what other people are interested in seeing in the next version.

So far, it looks like a cleaner, more intuitive UI and user documentation are desired.
What else?
Here are some of the recent additions to the survey bulder:
  • Cloneable items - for situations where you have a question like "How many siblings are in your family?" And you then want to provide first_names, last_name age, gender fields for each member.
  • Item grouping - for the purpose of tracking information across pages that relates to cloned items. For example, perhaps a survey continues to ask information about each sibling's hobbies. For reporting purposes, we need to preserve which items across pages related to which sibling.
  • xml export/import - We needed a cleaner way to do development on a survey on one system and then move that work over to a production server-- Pretty straightforward.
  • Growing items - this one allows the response range of an item to grow with an "other" option. For example, for a radio button question "What is you favorite color" with the response range of (red, blue, green) there will be an additional option "other" with an associated text box. The survey author can decide if admin approval is required before any user-submitted other colors are presented to subsequent users. Otherwise it becomes immediately available.
  • Template system - this allows developers to place procedure calls at the beginning and end of surveys. The procedures configure the properties of the page and item before the page displays.
  • Expanded policies - we needed to allow any member of a group to be able to come into a half-finished survey and complete it even though it was started by a different user. This capability was required in patient data management situations, for example, where a research assistant is collecting information from a patient who is participating in a clinical trial. We have several RAs working on a project, and a survey is capturing data related to a patient, but the data entry is being done by 1 or more RAs.