Hi All,

I have some questions about how best to setup my survey according to my client's requirements but I'm not really sure how to find the information so I would like to outline the scenario and maybe someone here can offer the insights I lack!

Basically, we have a survey designed to accommodate two different cohorts of respondent, group A and group B. The group is allocated via a drop down list selection in the first question group. The allocated group determines the logic path of the survey.

For every respondent, my client wants to:
1. answer the questions in the first question group (including the group allocation) themselves;
2. then generate a URL that they can send to the respondent for answering the remaining questions.

I think there is a way of achieving this using tokens and URL fields, but I don't really understand how - can anyone advise?

Many thanks!

Hmmm, I am not quite sure what your client is trying to do. Read it twice, but still doesn't make sense.

So at the end, they want to do two different surveys, the first one which also determines the group the respondent will be in, the second one which will be devided into two groups.

But why do they want to send the link via email?

Wait, now I get it, the client wants to fill in the first survey themselves about the respondent and receive a link to send for the second survey, which is self-administrated by the respondent, is that what you mean?

Hi, that's basically correct - the client wants to input the group (A or B ) and a few other pieces of information (such as respondent gender) and then generate a unique link that will allow the respondent to complete the rest of the survey without ever seeing the questions that were answered by the client. So I suppose we could do it with two surveys, one completed by the client and the other by the respondent, however the two surveys would then need to be linked so that the client can identify the respondent and also so that the logic of the second survey is correct according to the responses to the first.
It's a bit complicated but unfortunately a requirement (added late by the client, of course!). Ideally they would like it to all be one survey, which is partially completed by them before being forwarded to the respondent - but I now suspect that may not be possible...

I don't think it makes sense to have this all in one survey.

I would do it in two surveys and create a token table for the second one that includes the answers from the first survey that are important to pass on to the second survey. This way the respondents will not see this pre-filled information, but they can still be referenced from the second survey (e.g. for piping in text, creating conditions/relevance equations based on the custom attributes you created with these answers, etc).

Maybe there is a way to do this in one survey, but I am not aware of this.

Thinking about it, if it is really just the group and gender and so on, you might just skip the first survey all along and just do this in an Excel-Sheet which you can prepare as token table and export it to CSV, so you can import it into limesurvey as a token table. Probably the easiest option, if there are not too many "questions" in the first survey.

I think there are several ways of doing this. But much depends on how many respondents there will be, and on the time intervals between the respondents. Is there one group that will be invited at the same time? Or one or a few respondents each week/day? The csv export solution only works if there is a group of respondents that is invited in one batch.

Another solution that requires a little coding...

- Two surveys, one for admin, one for respondent
- Respondent-survey uses tokens
- Before submitting the admin-survey, make an AJAX call to a script that uses Remote Control 2 to add and invite a participant to the respondent-survey (AJAX call returns the token for later use)

Thanks all for your really helpful suggestions. I think the best solution in the first instance is to create a tokens table with the responses to the first survey pre-populated - I have recommended this to the client and will see what they say.

The AJAX route is intriguing and may well be the way we go if they are insistent on the two survey approach, so thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Kindest regards for your support and thanks to the LS team for an awesome resource generally!!