I am working on an application where I need to retrieve the questions including answer options for a bunch of surveys in python. Currently, I have a nested loop that goes through each survey, and retrieves anweroptions for each qid within that survey. The query time for this is about 15 - 60 seconds per survey, whereas a simple list_questions query only takes a few seconds. Is there any way to retrieve the answeroptions alongside other question with the list_questions (or another) command to speed this process up, and to avoid bombarding the API with queries?
Currently, my API query looks like this:
Code:
method = "get_question_properties"
for i in surveyIDs: # surveyIDs is a list of the surveyIDs the user has access to
# 'questions[i]' is a dataframe containing the results of a 'list_questions' query
questions[i]['answeroptions'] = None # add column for answeroptions
for index, row in questions[i].iterrows(): # for each question ID, we need to make a new API call
row['answeroptions'] = api.query(method=method, params=OrderedDict([
("sSessionKey", api.session_key),
("iQuestionID", row['qid']),
("aQuestionSettings", ['answeroptions'])
]))['answeroptions']
if row['answeroptions'] == 'No available answer options': # if no answer options are provided, we try to use the parent's answer options (e.g. array questions)
try:
row['answeroptions'] = questions[i][questions[i]['qid']==row['parent_qid']]['answeroptions'].reset_index(drop=True)[0]
except: row['answeroptions'] = None # if this fails too (usually means there is no parent, and the question is not a real question), set it to None
