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Edit the Column names in the Survey Reponse Database

  • KUKDAI
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9 years 6 months ago #112109 by KUKDAI
Whenever there is new response, a new row is added to a table in the survey database.
I see the column names in the survey is not well named.
I changed the column title getting in the survey database manually.
After that my survey stopped working.
I hope that it is not allowed to change the default name in the columns in survey.

Is there a way where we can modify the table or tell to create a different database that will store the answers in a single column and the column title is something we want.

Any guidelines anyone
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  • holch
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9 years 6 months ago #112112 by holch
The columns in the database need to be set by the survey system to work. That should be the case for ANY survey system.

When you export results you can either choose to have as column title the question code that you can define for each question when creating the question, or the question text itself.

What I don't understand: what do you want to store in only one column?

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9 years 6 months ago #112114 by KUKDAI
@holch
I am trying to read the result from the database with the id of the response. I will be using the answers to analyze for my application.
so for multiple choice answers when I read from the database programmatically in run time I cannot determine what was the answer to my question.

Looks like there is no database for Questions and answers but the only database is for Answer Codes and responded valued.

IF I have this Question

Indicate the over all Height of the populations. (Multiple Choice) (QuestionCode:PopulationHeight)

Short (Code:Short)
Medium (Code:Medium)
Long (Code:Long)

So I was looking for a database structure with this
Columnname ::Populationheight
Values:: short,medium ( When multiple are selected)

if I can get this structure that will be readable by my application.
Right now the structure is
we have three columns each or short, medium,long and value is either 0,1....

I have lot of multiple options is different questions which will be very hard for my program to read and analyze in Runtime.

So I was just curious if there is something availiable to meet this..

I am using a .net web application to analyze the data....
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9 years 6 months ago #112115 by holch
For questions where multiple answers are possible, each answer has it's own column. Actually, this makes it a lot easier to analyze, because you don't have various answers in one column (which in my opinion is a very messy approach). So what you need to do is to read various columns.

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9 years 6 months ago #112116 by KUKDAI
@holch,
may be it will be better if i don't need to retrieve the answers in run-time and display some output analyzing each selected answers of the 30+ questions in the survey.

when i can get 5 answers with text querying one single column.
rather than querying 5 columns just to determine whether the answer is true or not then if it is true get the text of that answer, it will take a load for analysis.

I tried with one application that ended up with 126 columns still i haven't added the all the options for country selection, that alone question will have 202 options.

At final point i have to feed the answer as an array for my application like Question code and answer code or text...

it will be good for simple applications but when you have 30+ questions with lot of multiple options it will be really hard to analyze.

Also looks like there is not multi-selection drop down list?
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9 years 6 months ago #112117 by holch
I think you will have a hard time to find a survey tool that stores the information the way you want. Basically all survey tools that I know store the way Limesurvey stores.

What you could try is to write the answers of various columns into one hidden question in the format that you require and then you read only this one column. But you would need to do this via Expression Manager or JavaScript I guess (not an expert on this).

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  • tpartner
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9 years 6 months ago - 9 years 6 months ago #112125 by tpartner

What you could try is to write the answers of various columns into one hidden question in the format that you require and then you read only this one column.

Yep, you should be able to use the Expression Manager join() function to insert a comma-separated list of answers to a multiple-choice question into an Equation type question .


Also looks like there is not multi-selection drop down list?

No, by definition a dropdown is single choice.


.

Cheers,
Tony Partner

Solutions, code and workarounds presented in these forums are given without any warranty, implied or otherwise.
Last edit: 9 years 6 months ago by tpartner.
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