Hi Everyone

Is there any way I can ensure that only complete surveys are saved to the SQL database?
I have a number of mandatory questions but if a survey user disconnects the incomplete survey is still registered in the database.

I have created a system where there is only one paticipant token that can submit surveys. Can that be related to the issue?

Best Regards
Mathias

sociotech wrote: Is there any way I can ensure that only complete surveys are saved to the SQL database?

No, cause every survey is incomplete till it is complete. If you use a token for access and persistence, the respondent can pause an hour and than continue to answer the survey. If the survey is not a one pager, you need to save an incomplete survey as well into the database.

You might ask for feature to clean up incomplete survey after a certain period of time (like you already know from sessions), but there will always be a timespan, where incomplete surveys are in the database. At least as long the survey data is saved in the database during the interview.

Thank you very much for your answer!
It was just in order to keep my SQL queries as simple as possible. I will then just test on a control question so I can avoid counting the incomplete surveys.

When you accessing the database table of the survey, you can query e.g. "Last page". A status complete variable should be there too. Haven't looked up the table, but that should be already available with adding additonal questions.

Update: I looked into the database tables.
The completed status seems to be only calculated.
Would be nice to have a complete status field in the surveytable as well.
But "last page" is in the survey table. If you know the number, you can just filter completes via that field.

Just like Jelo says: Every survey, complete or not complete needs to be saved in the database. Of course, incomplete surveys could be deleted later, but when is the right time?

People might have stopped the survey for a while and come back (depends on the session time how long they can do this). But it would be fairly annoying for the respondent to come back to the survey and find it deleted.

Or if you have set tokens, with token based answer persistence, then the respondent could come back any time they want to complete.

So I would keep the incompletes until the whole fieldwork has finished. Then you can just export the completes for your analysis. Or you can complete everything and calculate screen-out rates, which might be interesting as well.

As Jelo says, there is the last page column, where you can see how far the respondent got and determine who has finished and who has not and only read in those lines that have complete answers into your query.

The survey table has a column "submitdate". This only has a value for completed surveys.

jelo wrote: No, cause every survey is incomplete till it is complete.

such a delicious statement