Re: [phpesp-general] Editing surveys after they're Activated

[James E. F. <jf...@ac...>]

So what happens if you activate a survey, some people take
it, and then say you change an option on a dropdown list?
The people who've taken it already have their responses
saved in the database, keyed to the first set of options.
Then some more people take the survey, and their responses
get saved in the database, using the same keys -- but
corresponding to different values.

What good is a survey, if you don't know what the
respondant filled out!?

The "recomended" way to handle the situation is the
following...

First, be more careful. The "test" feature is there so that
you can say, "Hey Boss, this is what our survey is going to
look like, what do you think?".

Second, if you do Activate a survey then need to change it,
do the following.

1) End the first as quickly as possible.
2) Copy it.
3) Edit the copy.
4) Activate the copy, and put it up in place of the
   original.

Yes, this way you lose any responses from before you ended
the first one, but at least your data is consistent for
both (the old and new) copies.

If you *really* need to edit active surveys, then feel free
to add all the necessary checking to make sure that you do
not muck up key-value pairs ... but don't ask me to do it.
It is not trivial, and I certainly don't have time to do it
(for free).

-James

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Richard M. Pavonarius wrote:

> I second that motion. I activated a survey a few hours ago and just
> realized I forgot to polish up the confirmation page. Too late now. I'm
> just glad I didn't put something like "Thanks, pinhead." as a temporary filler.
>
> Rich
>
> At 15:10 02/02/25 -0500, you wrote:
> >I noticed that I could update values in the survey table to reset the values
> >for title and info, as well as update required in the questions table, all of
> >which would make the small necessary changes that were needed.
> >
> >My manager wants to also be able to add/delete answers to multiple-choice
> >questions - is this possible also through updating the database & SQL?  What
> >impact will that have?
> >
> >I added a feature request on Sourceforge to support editing surveys, even
> >after they're Active ... I don't understand why the state of the surveys are
> >so strict or uni-directional.
> >
> >Jason
> >
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