Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Survey Package Expansion Proposal

15: Response to Survey Package Expansion Proposal (response to 1)

Posted by Matthew Geddert on 10/24/02 10:19 PM

I have added two new sections to my website on survey expansion titled:

Feedback Within Survey (Technical) 
   and
Binding Surveys to Objects (Technical)

Please take a look when you get the chance.

Simon, i agree in part that some of the bugs need to be worked out in regular survey before talking about new-survey... my rational behind talking about it first was to determine how much of the current data model could be kept in tact, and how much had to leave... (and it looks at least from what i have proposed that much of it can stay).

Dave, are you the one to ask about getting CVS access to make updates to survey? Or should i do my own developement and send it to you as a tarball when it is done - at which point you would decide what to do with it? My main concern is "bug fixes" as Simon says, and me doing some work on the same thing you are doing work on. How would i present bug fixes to you? (BTW i will be developing only on Postgresql initially - in the long term i might be able to port to oracle as well, but at least initially that wouldn't be the case).

27: Re: Response to Survey Package Expansion Proposal (response to 15)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/01/02 07:11 PM

Ok, here is my initial response.

These are the sections I think need to be changed most, but I really want to think about all the data model changes some more.

1) Binding surveys to acs_objects

This definitely needs to be done with service contracts. We do not want to expost the internals of the survey package to the other packages. I have discovered more applications that might want to use surveys, so we need to carefully decide how to expose the survey functions through service contracts. We do not want the other packages to depend on the data model of survey.

2) Survey Templates

This is going to be handled by first fully templating the question display using ad_form or the form builder. After that a form template for each display type will be created. These will somehow be registered with the survey package and offered to the admin in a drop-down box.

Besides these things, I want to address the sequencing of survey sections. This seems like an important feature so we want to get it right. There are examples of this in the Survey Builder package built for ACS 3.4 and in ACES which implemeted a branching system.