Hi Guys,

I'm evaluating the use of limesurvey to manage a bunch of "application forms" for a client. Many forms share the data input of a "budget", where the applicant will list the income/expenses of their application as per this example below:



What I'm wondering is - how possible is this within the context of the LS framework, and has something similar been done already?

I was originally hoping I could approximate this with multiple numerical inputs (eg two fields: income + expenses could suffice) but that assumes a predefined list of options, whereas a "budget" can have any number of abitrary (per applicant) options with values.

My next step is to read up on creating my own custom question type which I suspect is the way forward.

cheers,
SM

What about using 3 (or 4) multiple-short-text questions and then a little CSS magic to display the questions side by side. This seems (to me) to be easier than creating a new question type.

It should be fairly easy to map the responses in analysis if you give the questions the same answer codes.

Thanks for the reply.

I had a quick go at setting that up but the problem is that each "row" of the incomes/expenses has 2 values - the text description of each item and its monetary value, eg:

Widgets - $34.99

What I was thinking was that you could define 3 fields/questions:

1. Incomes - long free text
2. Expenses - long free text
3. Budget Totals - multiple numerical input

The 2 x free text questions could be css'd to align side-by-side, and the budget totals question could have 3 subquestions - Total Income, Total Expenses, Net Budget.

The value of "Net Budget" could be computed automatically from the two totals.

Come to think of it, so could the Total Income/Expenses fields since it can assume each line of the textarea fields have a numerical value in there somewhere.

So yeh - a little JS tinkering and we've have a system in place that wouldn't be too hard to use?

// SM

Yep, that works too but if you want the multis side-by-side you should be able to hide any unwanted text desriptions with CSS/JavaScript.

Ah yes I understand now what you mean - cheers for the help!

Ay mates - I know this post is old. But would some lend a non-coder a hand and post the CSS that did the trick here? Scouring the forum for the search term "side by side" and striking out.
Any help would be much appreciated.
-Nebraska