Hi,
Loving Lime Survey; I wish to use it to collect new prospect data, which we then wish to export into a custom SQL Server based CRM system that we develop. My developer advises he wishes to work with CSV files rather than the proprietary XML. When we export survey responses in CSV format, the export uses the question descriptions as column headers which often include non-alpha-numeric chars such as commas and slashes etc (which are required for the survey questions, this causes our import to fall over. I appreciate there is an option to export field names only, which gets around this issue, however, the field names are very impossible to map, whereas questions are helpful here. Is there any way to extract the non-A/N chars as part of the export?
Thanks to anyone who can assist.
Brett

?

CSV export allow Expression manager code for export, i don't understand here.

In API : api.limesurvey.org/classes/remotecontrol...hod_export_responses string $sHeadingType = 'code'

What do you export ?
How do you export ?

Thanks DenisChenu,
I wish to export every question and every response into a CSV file. The header/column headers would be the questions with each survey response as a row. The problem is the questions containing special codes are exported as column/field headers in the CSV which breaks the import into SQL.
Thanks

Ah,

The survey description … maybe look at R syntax export ? Or SPSS syntax export?
You can try with Triple-S syntax export too : extensions.sondages.pro/export-statistic...ase/triple-s-export/ it's a standard format.

You can choose to export the whole header including questions or just the question code. The question code, by default can not include anything else than alphanumeric characters.

Many thanks however the resultant file is not usable.
It appears CSV is the only std format we can use for MS SQL, I am limited to this. As questions can contain non-A/N chars this will fail unless we use export question codes only, which is not workable due to the ambiguous nature of question codes. The survey tool needs another field at the question level "field description" which would be hidden from the published survey and could contain representative text for export with the response. The export would contain just the field description and responses only, not the Q code or actual survey questions. Lime?

Thanks, however as I included in my original question the code is not usable as it is too ambiguous for mapping purposes.

The survey tool needs another field at the question level "field description" which would be hidden from the published survey and could contain representative text for export with the response. The export would contain just the field description and responses only, not the Q code or actual survey questions. Lime?

I don't understand why the question code would be ambiguous. It is you that is setting the question code, and it must be unique per survey. Not sure where the problem is, so I probably can't help any further here.

Thanks anyway Holch... problem is that the survey creators are different to the mapping people, meaning that we will need to maintain data dictionaries which I would like to avoid. If Lime had another field at the question level, there would be no problem.
Regards,

I recommend to open a bug report or feature request to make your case about the mapping issue. If you can describe it as a bug, you can raise more awareness But not sure if that is the case here. From breaking characters to a missing questio field to map users might need some more explanation in the bug/feature report.

Thanks mate

@holch : he want to export dictionnary of survey, not something other.

I already send 3 way of export dictionnary differnt than core, i really don't see why LimeSurvey core offer another non standard way.

We have
R , used by a lot of people and open source
SPSS : used by a lot of people, not free, but PSPP exist
Triple-S : standard

And more : we already have STATA

If needed a specific way : create a plugin (or ask a partner ) are the best solution.