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Dropdown with external data (Help me Obi-Lime-Kenobi you are my only hope)

  • sociotech
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6 years 1 week ago #165447 by sociotech
Hi!

I am trying to improve the workflow of a survey. The survey will be used by field staff in various countries to report on children's welfare in school. I would, therefore, love to make a drop-down menu only showing the schools participating in the project for a given country.


About school selection, I need to capture the following information: School name, coordinates and region code.

I envision that it is possible to create a separate survey for entering school name and Geoformation using the map feature and let the main survey get the information from there.

The field staff access the survey with their token as "Survey participants" with custom attributes for Country Code and Country team. I think I can use the Country Code attribute to only show the schools for the given country and then have a drop-down with schools.

I think this is a bit more than EM can handle and additional javascript and SQL calls might be needed.

From previous survey experience, this could reduce data entry errors by to 60%.

The main issue for not coding the options in hidden questions is that I am working with many unknown variables. The survey is going to be rolled out in more than 25 countries, and I have no information about participating schools.
It is easy just to let the participant fill out the name of the school and the location, but this will lead to different spelling and variation of location and in this way the data quality will suffer. A drop down would solve this, and I hope that it is possible to get some solution like that within the scope of my project.

This feature is a must-have for my client that is NGO with a tight budget. I hope you can help me in the right direction or if you have time to code it I can offer a small reward and eternal gratitude!!!
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6 years 1 week ago #165450 by jelo

sociotech wrote: The main issue for not coding the options in hidden questions is that I am working with many unknown variables. The survey is going to be rolled out in more than 25 countries, and I have no information about participating schools.

You might explain a bit more, which person should provide on which way the external data? What does roll out mean in terms of how many different surveys are activated? One survey for all countries? Or one separate survey for each country?

What LimeSurvey version is used?

You might can work with the workaround described here first.
www.limesurvey.org/forum/can-i-do-this-w...with-long-value-list

A nice drilldown question type which can be filled by a csv would be nice feature request.

The meaning of the word "stable" for users
www.limesurvey.org/forum/development/117...ord-stable-for-users
The following user(s) said Thank You: sociotech
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