Hi there,

I am new to Lime survey. I have a requirement to design a survey for people to register their table seating preference for a dinner function.

Assuming that there are 20 tables with 10 seats per table, I envision a survey with a drop-down list containing 20x10 = 200 options. So the dropdown list looks something like this:

Seat 01-01
Seat 01-02
...
Seat 01-10
Seat 02-01
...
Seat 20-10

Once someone has chosen a seat (let's say seat 02-01), this answer option is removed from the dropdown list for the people who respond to the survey subsequently.

Is it possible to populate dropdown list dynamically from a label set, with some condition such that it only populates those label that is not marked as taken. This will then require at the completion of the survey, that it updates the label set the seat option that has been taken.

There is no "out-of-the-box" solution for this.

The only thing I can think of is fairly complicated: Use JavaScript/AJAX to call a PHP script that queries the database and returns the options already selected. The JS then removes those options from the dropdown.

This wouldn't really help though if 2 users accessed the DB at the same time - they could see and select the same options.

Limesurvey was not designed for such complex tasks and it is not possible to disable an answer once it was chosen.
You can have a look at manual -> quotas but still that's not a perfect solution.
Better watch out for other tools, what about a simple spreadsheet at google docs for example?

I think this is less a task for a survey tool and more for a reservation tool (like for hotel rooms, etc.).

Thanks for everyone's feedback.

I have a spreadsheet that provides this functionality. It is uploaded to Sharepoint, and the participants will checkout the document and make their seating plan choice. The problem with this is that I can't prevent people from modifying other's choice as there is no control on the spreadsheet.

Of course this is not too difficult to build using php / java, I just want to explore if there is any oob solution to this before exploring the custom-build otion.

Problem is that this is a rather complex issue. You can look at for booking or room reservation software and maybe adapt those.
Also have a look at Doodle (doodle.com/), maybe when giving some instructions like "you are NOT allowed to mark a column that was already marked by someone else" this might work.