Building custom surveys

Support
1

Hi all,

I'm looking for any examples of best practice (or interesting solutions!) to allow non-technical users to build their own surveys, using a pre-defined list of questions and answers. For example, users being able to select or drag-and-drop questions and then export their own custom survey.

Has anyone worked on something similar at all? Any open source solutions out there that I might have missed? I'm very interested in seeing any demonstrations of this - from impressive complex Excel macros, to GUI solutions. Similarly, any workarounds that others may have put together to tackle this issue without a full build would also be useful to discuss.

Thanks!

Calum

1 Like
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Hi @Calum

you can use ODK Build or xls. When it comes to xls here is an example form with all widgets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1af_Sl8A_L8_EULbhRLHVl8OclCfco09Hq2tqb9CslwQ/edit?ouid=113855100722173642692&usp=sheets_home&ths=true and here you can find the documentation: http://xlsform.org/

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Hi Grzegorz,

Thanks for the quick reply. However, I don't think I've explained this too well!

ODK Build/XLSForms are great for starting forms from scratch. However, we have a set of existing forms (for example, household survey modules). Instead of developers having to copy and paste the relevant lines from Excel/strings from XML, I'd like a simpler way to build a survey using pre-developed questions. Like Build, but with questions already loaded so users can drag and drop them to build a survey. Does that make sense?

Thanks,

Calum

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What you describe would be useful. We've been looking at a similar issue. How to best store/search/share survey questions/question-groups/etc.

KoboToolbox lets you create a "Library" of questions. But when I've tried it, I've not been happy with the functionality.

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Hi Dan,

Agreed, it would be helpful! The Toolbox functionality isn't something I've used much at scale, but it's not hugely slick. How are you guys managing this? As an intermediary, I've tested building a database of questions/answers and then building a survey based on what users generate from that database - but it would be great to automate the workflow!

Calum

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We don't have anything good in place. I've got a GoogleDrive folder full of old XLSForms and rely on my memory for which ones have questions done in clever ways that I like. Then it's a bunch of copy/paste. Internally, the people that do XLSForm stuff is probably about 5-10 people. Being able to automate the workflow and open it up to more people (i.e. with a GUI) would be great.

1 Like
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@danbjoseph/@calum What are the main pain points with Kobo's form library?

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Hi @yanokwa,

Sorry for the delay in replying! My main pain points were: not being able to upload questions in XML format (but it looks like this is now possible, so I'll have a play with this), and also not being able to set permissions for users - as currently, unless I'm mistaken, users can edit questions that they add from the library. I also found it quite resource-intensive on some less-powerful machines, which made it difficult when building bigger surveys. I also thought it would be useful to have the question library available offline, which I don't think is currently possible.

The functionality is exactly what I'm looking for, though, so perhaps it warrants a deeper test.

Best,

Calum