Hello!


For an University Project, I'm trying to develop this function:

We'd like to download the whole survey to our smartphone or computer, then fill out the survey, re-upload to limesurvey (maybe via json) and get the result. Our survey calculates some statistics based on the given answers. The survey is stored in a web-server.

That's the process:

online part
1. Download the survey (pdf, html?)

offline part

2. Fill out the survey

online part
3. Upload to the system
4. Get the results

How can we do that?

develnick wrote: For an University Project, I'm trying to develop this function

If you're not a developer, you might hire a developer.
If you're just looking for solutions on the market, you might take a look the Android Offlinesurveys
www.offlinesurveys.com/
www.limesurvey.org/forum/offline-surveys-android-app

And if you're a developer, you might propose a solution yourself.
The questions would then need to be a lot more specific

I think Offlinesurveys, which was mentioned by Jelo, is actually what you are looking for, when I understood you right.

It is an app, that allows you to fill out a Limesurvey survey while offline and you can send the answers to your online Limesurvey installation, once you have online access again.

Offlinesurvey should be our scenario.

However this project is closedsource. We'd like to develop an opensource project. Do you know how they created this app?

Every hint is appreciated.

OK, so you don't want to use it, but you want to build it. I have no insights into how they built it, but from what I understand is that they download the whole survey as HTML and go from there. How? No idea!

develnick wrote: We'd like to develop an opensource project.

Who is we? The knowledge of the developers and the timeframe might reduce your options to realize such a project.

Personally I wouldn't invest time into copying the function of OfflineSurveys for the android platform.

Depending on the timeframe I would e.g. investigate, if WebAssembly could act as an platform.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly

If not, you would have to decide which OS you want to run from.
iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS etc...

OfflineSurveys communicates via the LimeSurvey remote control (LimeSurvey API) with a LimeSurvey installation. The complete survey has to be on one page, which will be cached and split into one by one views by the android app. Since it is closed source I have no knowledge about the concepts used.


Offline HTML (without any helper application) is also not new.
Depending on the scope of your project, you might learn more about directly creating forms and take them offline.
www.html5rocks.com/en/features/offline

We'd like to download the whole survey to our smartphone or computer

If you use tablet(s) or computers with an operating system suitable for LimeSurvey (eg. Surface Pro), you place copies of the survey on each device and use VV export/import to upload the data to the master survey.

tpartner wrote: If you use tablet(s) or computers with an operating system suitable for LimeSurvey (eg. Surface Pro), you place copies of the survey on each device

Just to get the difference clear.

Your solution is based on installing a running LimeSurvey server on every device and merging the data into the local LimeSurvey installation.

That is the solution, which can be realized without "developing" anything.
Which would also be the only solution which fits into a tight timeframe.

That is what I understand when I read "place copies of the survey on each device".

easy and fast way to do :

play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esminis.server.apache

then you'll only need to code a synchronization script.

LimeSurvey would need two additional apps (PHP and MariaDB) by the same developer.
bitbucket.org/esminis/server/wiki/Home

jelo wrote: That is what I understand when I read "place copies of the survey on each device".

Yes, exactly, an installed instance of LS on every device.

As I understood the second response from OP, it is not actually about running a survey offline as such, but rather about creating an open source tool that allows to do that. Basically an open source version of Offlinesurveys.com. They want to create a tool that allows Limesurvey to be used offline. On a desktop the LS XAMPP version would do the trick already, on tablets you can install something similar (I have run a complete installation of LS on a smartphone already for test purposes already, but a couple of years back).

I could be totally wrong though.