Thank you for using Scanraid Surveys. If you can't find what you need in this document please email us at surveys@scanraid.com. We promise to be quick to answer and your question will help us improve the product and the documentation.
Documentation on Installing the Software is here.
On the home page is a red button called Create New Survey. It won't create it until you have given the survey a new name. Once that is done you will be presented with some configuration options, but you can go straight to setting up questions if you want.
The survey questionnaire is below the settings form and is laid out to be similar to what the respondee would see. The main difference is that the different pages are organised into blocks all on the same page.
If you have not already entered yourself in the user list you should do so. Out of the box (so to speak), the administrator user is a likely security risk. It exists only so that you can get in for the first time. You should overwrite this user. Your new survey will be assigned to you but you can change to another administrator if you wish.
Selecting the Design, Open or Closed option is a mnemonic for you and other users. Completed surveys should be set to Open and once finished with set to Closed, so that you know what state a survey is in.
Note: You can only edit a survey in Design mode. See the rules that invalid responses when editing a survey
Adding dates are optional. Users will not be able to login if today is outside either of those dates. This only applies to the login page - not embedded surveys.
When you create a survey for the first time some things are created for you. This includes the opening page with a dummy title [First page Title] which you should edit. It also create a Thank-you page. The only 'question' on this page is presentation text with the words 'Thank you for completing this survey'. This is a prompt for you to edit this page and put some suitable and warm words for the respondee to see at the end.
Note: The Thank-You page is an important part of the way the survey system hangs together. It is most important that questions are not added to this page. It is also important that the survey consists of at least one page + the thank-you page. If you remove the thank-you page or combine it you may find that the entry or exit point will not work properly. All this is by design and is becomes more important when some pages are conditional on the response to questions.
When you create a survey you will have the option to make it one of four types. In combination with the settings for the Done button, multiple surveys can be combined in an exciting and complex manner. The four types are:
What happens at the end of the survey is equally important to the start. It was stated above in the description of the Thank-you page that you should terminate the survey with some suitable words. This is a page that must have no questions on it. The Done button can be configured depending on the environment you have embedded the survey
Consider this situation. You want to survey a number of company's that have branches around the country. The traditional way would be to have a single survey with the same questions repeated over and over so that you hope there is enough repetition to cover those company's with the most branches. This is a tall order for the poor person who has to fill in this survey all at once. Plus, its hugely redundant for those companies with few branches.
Our solution is to create a parent survey with lots of text and advice but no questions. Instead you embed two surveys specifically addressing questions about the company (universal) and their braches (branch specific).
The consolidated report can be used to view all the responses for a particular respondee so you can see the results from all branches side by side.
There are thirteen question types each with lots of options to make the questions you design very flexible. All questions can be set to compulsory or optional and all come with java validation so entries can be checked before submission.
We use the login screen both for administrators and survey users. If you are an administrator you will be taken to the Survey system where you can edit all the surveys. If you are a survey respondee (registered or not) you will be taken to the survey whose number is set in the file SurveyID.txt. The important line is
StartSurvey = 5
Because of the way the Login Page is designed you cannot have more than one survey system at the same web address (i.e. in the same directory. You are more than welcome to copy the scripts to set up two or more surveys. See the section below about multiple surveys.
To find the survey ID look at the top of the Survey Edit page under "General Information"
You license is per server so you are welcome to create as many surveys on your web server as you like. It is not a problem that you copy all the scripts and have, in effect, two administration systems. Both will be accessing the same database so updates will be reflected in both sides.
The important reason for copying everything is so that you can modify the StartSurvey value in SurveyID.txt.
Note: If you question is about embedding surveys within surveys or allowing the same user to enter the same survey multiple times, then read the sections below, as this is a different issue and is handled in a different, and I might add, clever way. Here we are only concerned with the login page and what survey it links to.
Many survey systems we have evaluated do not allow survey editing if there are responses already in the system. Responses must be purged before editing is allowed. This is a good thing if you are paranoid about messing up your data.
Scanraid Surveys takes the opposite tack. The administrator, if he wants to keep existing responses, can edit the survey if he or she sticks to these rules.