Hi All,

I need to build a survey in which activities are rated. There are several item groups each having around 50 items. This is a lot and I want to generate the questions and import them into LimeSurvey instead of creating them manually in the web UI.

Now, the only chance I see to do this is by exporting a questionnaire, adding the questions with a script and then importing the survey again.

Unfortunately the situation presents itself to me the following way (correct me if I'm wrong)(LS Version 1.92):

- you can export as .lss (LimeSurvey XML) and queXML
- you can import from .lss and .csv

I cannot find any documentation about the .csv file format. Also there is no option to export a questionnaire as .csv so that I could take a look. That was initially frustrating.

What frustrated me even more though was, that you can export queXML but there doesn't seem to be a way to import queXML. Why this was frustrating? Well, because queXML, in contrast to LimeSurvey's .lss, is a well designed and readable (attributes hardly ascribable to XML in general tough) XML-format.

@LimeSurvey developers: The .lss files are merely not readable and I think it is just a serialization of your internal data model. While it is very comfortable to a developer to just use a de-/serialization library for import/export functionality, in most cases this produces something that people can't work with anymore. This happened here. I know there were a lot of problems with the CSV (judging from comments in the documentation) but it gave the users the option to manually edit a survey in cases where using the web UI were just not feasible (like adding tons of questions like in my case).

I know it may involve some work, but just adding a group of questions via a queXML or CSV import would be very nice feature.

If it is just because of the 50 items, the easiest way is to use the quick add feature, where you can copy directly from Excel (just in case you haven't seen that before).

But I assume besides the items in each question, you probably also have a lot of questions?

I have no idea why queXML can not be importet, but I guess there are some good reasons for that. Let's see what the developers say.

bwulff wrote: @LimeSurvey developers: The .lss files are merely not readable and I think it is just a serialization of your internal data model.

lss files is in XML, and XML is easily readable and manageable with a lot of tools.

You have TSV export if you like SpreadSheet.

Denis

The way to go from queXML -> LimeSurvey is to use the stylesheet conversions provided in the queXML project.

There is a public access service available here: surveys.acspri.org.au/quexmltools/quexml2limesurvey.php

It will produce a file that can be imported by LimeSurvey.