SurveyPortletFeatures

Survey Portlet Features

The Survey Portlet allows an administrator to view, create, modify and delete surveys, questions and answers.
She can also download the details and the results of a survey in a CSV-like file. This file has sections with the survey details, the questions, answers, answer count (how many people answered) and the list of all custom answers (answers provided by users).

NOTE You should try to finalize the survey as much as possible before opening it to the public. Some data could become useless or the result unpredictable if you do major edits to the survey after someone answered it. E.g.: change the order of questions. An answer might have a skip-to question (destination) which makes sense if its position is at least greater by 2 from the (source) question.
It should be easy to decide if a modification could have bad effects if performed.

Authentication

Up to version 1.4.0 there is only one authentication mechanism: IP check. When a user answers a question, the IP she's connecting from is recorded with her answers. You won't be allowed to save the same question twice from that IP. This method is not completely fare (authentication is not attached to the user) but it's simple and requires no Liferay account. If you have a wide audience and can assume every participant has her own device you should be fine to choose this method.
From version 1.5.0 you can set up a survey where a user is required to log in to her Liferay account before she can take the survey. Choose Liferay user as the authentication type when you create the survey.

Surveys

... have a start and end date. Within their life they can be activated or deactivated.
Once active and within their life span they appear in the Open Surveys list of the Take a Survey Portlet for users to choose from.
They have a name, a description and a set of questions.

Questions

... have a description (the text of the question itself), a position, the type of the answers (currently: single choice, multiple choice and single answer) and a set of answers.
The position (order) of the questions can be changed after their creation.

Answers Type

• Single Choice: only one answer can be chosen from a set of answers (radio buttons);
• Multiple Choice: more than one answer can be chosen from the possible answers (check box);
• Single Answer: there is only one possible answer. This makes sense when coupled with the requirement that the user enters its own custom answer (see Custom Description value for Answer Mode).

Answers

... have a description (the text of the answer itself), a position and a mode (currently: selection or custom description. See Answer Mode.)
When displaying the list of answers of a question, if an answer has custom-description answers, a link will be provided to the paged list of all custom descriptions.

Branching (Skip-to Question)

An answer of type Single Choice or Single Answer can have a skip-to-question field. If this answer will be selected, the user will automatically skip all intermediate questions up to the one defined as skip-to.
It makes no sense to define a skip-to-question on an answer of type Multiple Choice because this feature defines an action when a particular answer and only that answer is chosen.
All questions in the middle will be marked as answered and they will contain no answer.
A user cannot skip a question where there is at least 1 answer with a skip-to-question field defined. If this were possible, a user could skip the question (question A), answer question B, C and come back later at question A and choose an answer with a skip-to-question field skipping to question D. We would then have an answer for questions (B and C) which shouldn't have been presented to the user.

Answer Mode

• Selection: the answer can be selected;
• Custom Description: the answer is open (will be provided by the user).