Hello!

Apologies is this topic has been mentioned before, but I couldn't find any reference to it.

On a new Limesurvey 4 installation (also when upgrading from 3.x) and going to the edit page for a question, I see a random number to the right of the question code, and also the internal question type coding appears on the question type selector. What does the number means? Is there any way to eliminate both things?

Thank you,

Ginet

Why would you want to eliminate this?

"Type A" stands for "Array (5 point choice)". Limesurvey internally uses codes for the question types for programming. I think it is actually a good thing to see this, because it makes clear what type the question exactly is.

They number next to the code seems to be a countdown of how mandy characters are left for your code, if I recall right. Also not a bad feature. And if you don't use it, at least it doesn't hurt anyone.

If you really, really, really want to get rid of them, you probably would have to hack the source code, which can be overwritten by any future update. So I don't recommend it.

Hello holch,

Thanks for your prompt response.

I understand what the meaning of the "Type:X" is for the question types and its importance at the code/programming level, but I think it doesn't add any value to end users that see them, especially if they don't have any coding/programming background. I can also see how it would be very confusing for them when going from version 3 to 4, since the former didn't show that.

Same happens with the number, if there is no clear way for the user to know it's a countdown of how many characters are left for the code.

Is this documented somewhere?

My hope was that there would be a fairly easy way to hide both things from the user interface, either by changing some setting in the global configuration, or tweaking a limesurvey configuration file in the installation filesystem.

Thanks again,

Ginet

I can also see how it would be very confusing for them when going from version 3 to 4, since the former didn't show that.

Not sure why someone would really get confused by that, but OK. Point taken.
I don't think that there is an easy way to hide this via the GUI or config files. Maybe you could try to hide it via CSS or Javascript in the admin templates. No idea.

I still think it is not worth the effort, as I really don't see how this could confuse people for more than 2 seconds.

And: if you work with the XML files, etc. then showing the codes is helpful, for you to understand which question type has which code (e.g. if someone is adding questions via Excel. Might not be relevant for most people, but it might be relevant for some.

You could always create a feature request, but to be honest, I think there are far more important things to fix in LS 4.x right now than those little details. There are many bugs which I would call "show stopper", which is why I currently do not recommend to use LS 4 for productive use. Stay with LS 3.x a couple of weeks/months longer. It is still supported, it just doesn't receive any additional features.

I had a quick look at the interface and it should be fairly easy to hide those two elements with CSS.

This is how the character count for the question code is implemented (I still believe this is a good feature because it shows you the limit of the length of the codes, but hey, whatever floats your boat... ):



So you basically would need to hide the CSS class "typeCounter--container". This should get rid of the character counter (not tested!).


And her the code for the Question types.

This might require a little bit more of testing because I don't know if the class "small" is used in other occasions (I would think so). So you might have to specify the ID of the DIV it is in maybe. To avoid that it disappears on other occasions. My guess would be that it is "accordion_question_type_selector_QuestionSelect-128". What irritates me is the 128 at the end. Not sure what this stands for and if there are various of these with different numbers at the end. You would have to test this.

Now you need to check where the CSS files for the admin interface themes are and either create your own theme (might not work anymore after some updates that impact the admin themes) or adapt an existing one (chances that it gets overwritten with updates).

As I said, I personally don't think that these features (you might see them rather as "bugs") will concern anyone for more than 2 seconds.

But I think I have shown you an option on how to hide these two things.