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compare to previous records 'on the fly'

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8 years 10 months ago #120172 by liw
Hi all,

I am looking for a solution on keeping track of participants among several projects in our lab. I was thinking/hoping it may be possible to create a LS survey were our lab members can type in participant info to be compared to the already existing records.

Longer explanation:
- we have a series of projects running and we need to prevent the same individuals to participate in multiple of these projects. There are/will be quite a few people involved in recruiting. ATM we check potential participants using excel files stored on a shared server. However: not all our recruiters (for instance our students) have access to this drive for privacy reasons. Plus, in the long run these 'manual checks' will be rather time consuming. Ideally I'd like a set-up were each of our recruiters can submit a name (and or e-mail adress) over the internet which 'a program' then tests for similarities returning possible matches without displaying the full record of participants so far (again for privacy reasons, but also because we will test several hundreds of pp between the various projects). I guess this could easily be done using google docs for instance, but given the nature of this data (names!) I wish to keep info confined to secured university servers. For this reason our university limesurvey account seems ideal to use.

Current state:
I've been tinkering around a bit with token tables but I can't quite get what I like.

Did anyone ever done or heard about anything like this being done?

Any thoughts will be much appreciated!

All best,

liw
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8 years 10 months ago #120177 by holch
Replied by holch on topic compare to previous records 'on the fly'
I don't think that this very special case can be covered with Limesurvey internal functions. You will probably have to set up a own list.

What you could do is use the central participant database to store these names and registers, but then within the survey you would probably have to create your own custom AJAX call to check if a certain person has already participated. Because this isn't stored in the central participant database, but in each survey table.

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8 years 10 months ago #120180 by liw
Hi Holch,

Thank you! Not quite sure if I am up to writing custom AJAX calls >.>

Just to double check things though: my aim is not to compare information between 'surveys' (the actual 'testdata' for these participants are collected on 'local' installations of LS on non-internet connected PCs). What I look for is more or less a simple 'webform' that any of our researchers can open, enter info in, which is then compared to previously entered info through a string search. If no match, the researcher should be able to add a new entry to the search 'database'. Ergo: no accounts, no e-mails, etc etc, just a simple stringcomparison. My initial line of thought was that it might be possible to 'transfer' an answer to the tokentable for any subsequent entries to be checked against but I am not quite sure if 'vertical' searches through the already existing tokens are possible, nor how to add a string from an answer to the token table.
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8 years 10 months ago #120183 by holch
Replied by holch on topic compare to previous records 'on the fly'
The problem is, that from within a questionnaire you can NOT check answers to other questionnaires for this survey (because this is usually a different respondent), thus you would need to call the column where the participant data is stored to check if the respondent is there already. But that is why I suggested a ajax call (I have no idea on how to do that though).

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8 years 10 months ago #120185 by liw
That makes sense. Thank you!
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