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I am running a survey that needs to iterate several times. Some of the participants are required to reply in multiple roles and are therefore assigned one token for each role. The survey is really long and time consuming and a few of them would need to reply in the same way to all the questions. Because of this, I was asked to copy the reply from one participant (one token of one respondent) to its other participants (the other tokens of the same respondent). For internal purposes, I can copy paste their replies after exporting the responses table, but I could not find a way to update the responses also in Epsilon, which is useful to avoid repeating the same process whenever there is a change to other responses. I tried modifying the VV file by copy pasting everything related to the questions and leaving unchanged the response ID and token, but it seems that any time I modify the VV file, it cannot be re-imported in Epsilon. Is there a way to successfully edit and import the VV file, or any alternative way to do it?

Thank you very much in advance for your support!.



 

What is Epsilon?

And why did you not fill in the questions at the beginning, like Limesurvey version, etc.?

Thank you holch and sorry for missing that, I am not posting here often.
Epsilon is the platform based on Limesurvey we use in my organisation to build and run surveys, and I think it could also be the server/hosting. I could not find the exact version or the theme. The version should be at least Limesurvey 3, since I see Limesurvey3 is part of the URL generated.

OK, than it is clarified what Epsilon is. But I think it is better to mention Limesurvey instead of Epsilon in the future, to avoid confusion. Now the question is, how much is Limesurvey modified within this "Epsilon", is it a clean install, or have adaptations been made...

The Limesurvey version can usually be found on the bottom right of any Limesurvey administration page. If the version isn't there, then we can already say that your installation has been modified in some way or the other.

In any way, I don't really have a solution for your problem, I never had to do something similar.

From what I know, the VV file should be able to re-upload. People use it this way.

What are you using to modify the VV file and what is the error message you are getting?

I checked, but I could not find the Lime version number anywhere in the platform unluckily.
When I download the VV file, it is downloaded as a .csv, so I have used excel to open it and modify it. The weird thing is that if I download and then upload the same file without doing any editing, I can successfully upload and import the responses. However, if I do any kind of edit the import fails. I even tried doing a very simple edit, i.e. moving a row to the end and then moving it back to its original position, so that the file was apparently exactly the same, but also in this case the import failed. Below is the error I got:

Import a VV response data file
Success
File upload succeeded.

Error
Import failed: No answers could be mapped.

Excel is usually not a good tool to edit CSVs, in my experience. Excel is/was doing some weird stuff to CSV files.

So I usually use LibreOffice calc for editing CSVs (despite using MS Office for basically anything else). As we speak I am installing the most recent LibreOffice version, because I need to edit a CSV file...

And just for fun: Open your untouched VV file with a text editor and do the same with one that has been edited with Excel and compare them. My guess would be that Excel changes something like comma and semicolon.

Hi,
if you have access to the database and are a bit experienced with phpMyAdmin, you can do this:

With "Enable token-based response persistence:  ON"

1. Copy the record of this participant in "lime_survey_[SurveyID]"
In this appearing screen change the token to the desired one, change "submitdate" to NULL and lastpage to "1".
2. After the copy process you see the generated SQL statement. This you may use  especially because you only want to copy certain values.

Joffm

 

Joffm, I highly doubt that he will get access to the database for this installation at the European Central Bank.

Unfortunately Gregorio didn't show anything.

So we have to guess.

If I open a vv-Export in LibreOffice Calc I see this
 

I change the token to "222" and save as ".csv"
 

Compared with the original file
 

we see that it is nor TAB-separated but comma-separated.
After a "Search&Replace" we have a TAB-separated file.

In the vv-Import we have a lot of options:
 

1. Of course we exclude the record ID
2. And also we import as not finalized answer
3. First line contains the code of questions?
No, the second line contains the code; the first line contains a verbatim text.
Therefore we remove this first line from the csv-file
and now we can answer this question with "YES"
 

Now the import:
Here the original answer table
 

and after import
 

Joffm

NEVER use Excel to edit CSV files.

Thank you all for your really good advice! I used Visual Studio Code to modify the .csv and the import finally succeeded.
Comparing with the file I modified with excel, it looks like a double prime was added at the beginning of each row.