Greetings fellow limesurvey users,

we are currently designing a survey which overchallenged the column capacity of limesurvey.
The first way we dealt with this was to seperate our initial survey into two subsurveys and chain them via the quote option. This worked pretty good, but we now see that we have to split the survey into three subsurveys in order to dealt with the column restriction.

Therefore, we tried the quote option again and encountered a problem regarding the length of the URL. It is limited, which means, we ware not able to transfer our filters and conditions from one survey to the other. We also tried to use the end_URL option, but we were not satisfied with the results.

Our survey contains round about 115 different actors, which are meant to describe their relations to each other. The first of our questions lets the resondend choose with which actors he interacts. After that he is asked questions about the nature of these relationships. The problem is that the first Question with its 115 Subquestions (multiple choice) acts as a filter for the following variables, which means, that we have to add these 115 Subquestions to every other of the follow up questions.

Our questions:

1. Would it be possible to extend the space for the URL within the Quote Option?
2. Is there a possibility to use only subquestions which were initially choosen? For labels of the follow up questions?
3. Do you have other suggestions or solutions to deal with this problem?

What version/build of Limesurvey is used? What database is used?
If switching to different surveysoftware is no option, you might try to increase the columns via a different database.
Personally I would invest a few more hours in the survey design. Perhaps there is way to rearrange questions to reduce the ammount of columns needed.

Hey Jelo,

currently, we are hosting on LimeSurvey.org. There is no option to switch to another surveysoftware since only LimeSurvey provides us with enough customization options.

We are using the latest version of LimeSurvey. In the begin of the survey, we have to ask for contacts to different persons. This number is fixed because of the way our research is designed. Every following question checks, which of the answers to the first question were given. If there would be a way to fill the subquestions with the answers given to the first question, we wouldn't have this problem. For now, we use a filter which basically just hides subquestion and thereby produces an unused entry in the database.

It would be easy if one could pass that answers to another survey like &var=01100111000111100111110101.

So what is URL length needed? Where is the limit. Do you have an example with a length you need?

You might change the coding of 01011101 to a more complex coding scheme.

1
2
4
8
16
32
64

If option one and two is chosen the code would be 3(1+2). Still complex to decode on the other side. Haven't had to do that. Even my 25 minute-surveys didn't hit any limits in the database.

You might try to change questionstypes to reduce the amount of columns needed.
Since I haven't seen the questionnaire, it might be impossible to change question types.

What is the Limesurvey-Support telling you?

Is there a maximum number of actors they can select?

If so, you don't need a following question set for every actor - you can...

- Reduce the question sets to that maximum number
- Load a hidden multi-short-text question with the actor names (via JavaScript)
- Use Expression Manager to pipe them into the following questions.

Hallo Jelo,
Hello Tpartner,

thank you both for your suggestions. The solution provided by tpartner would be much simpler, I suppose. There is no maximum number of actors one person can select, but there is a limit of plausible answers (obviously).

Tomorrow I will try to solve our issue as you suggested. If you could provide me with a script example of how to insert the names of the actors into the hidden multi-short-text question, that would be very helpful.

But to raise a fundamental question here: Is there a way to pipe all values of a multiple choice question into another survey via GET parameter?

Thank you very much!

If you could provide me with a script example of how to insert the names of the actors into the hidden multi-short-text question...

What LimeSurvey version are you using?

TSpeirs wrote: There is no maximum number of actors one person can select, but there is a limit of plausible answers (obviously).

Which translates into what maximum?
If you follow the approach from tpartner you might can stay in one survey without URLEncoding/Decoding.
Bridging survey is painful. You loose a lot of functionality and have to add workarounds. So it is worth trying to get everything in one survey. Most of my Limesurvey projects where bridged surveys with two limesurveys and one different tool in between.

I'm still wondering about the piping in the last step since EM isn't offering a dynamic list object to choose items from. But I might haven't really understood the whole idea.

tpartner wrote: What LimeSurvey version are you using?

We are using Version 2.67.2

jelo wrote: Which translates into what maximum?

I would say, it's around half of it: 50 out of 100

We are already in the situation of having to surveys linked together because of the limits of LimeSurvey.

I'm still wondering about the piping in the last step since EM isn't offering a dynamic list object to choose items from.

I was thinking of simple text-piping for the follow-up questions. We can't target the value of a "first checked" item in a multiple-choice but we can target the value in the first sub-question of a multi-short-text.

So, something like this in the text of a question in follow-up set 1:

If you could provide me with a script example of how to insert the names of the actors into the hidden multi-short-text question...

1) Insert a multiple short text question directly after the multiple choice question. The multiple short text needs to have the same number of sub-questions as the maximum answers allowed in the multiple choice question.

2) Give the multiple short text question a class "hidden".

3) Add this script to the text of the multiple choice question:


Sample survey attached:

Thank you very much. This way we manage to get enough questions before tackling the boundary of LimeSurvey.

That being said, we still need a way to hiding the empty rows created that way. Another issue still remains. We have used HTML in the description of our answer options <img src="">. Is there a way to pipe this too?

We really appreciate your efforts in helping us. Without your suggested script we would be pretty much lost by now. So again - thank you!