Embed a survey management tool in my Filemaker solution

[Christiaan]

Hi Guys,

I need a little bit of advice here. I hope you could help.

We are working on an FM application to store, order, and supplier information of our Client. This company has several employees whose daily job is to go around and collect information from those suppliers. (this can be a wide range of questions)
Since the information they want to collect from their supplier can be different all the time. They would like to add a survey management module to the application. 
In this module, the user (without any FM development knowledge) should be able to easily create a wide range of different surveys for their employees to take off their suppliers. The employees will use our FM application to navigate to the suppliers and take the surveys.

At first sight, I think making something like this in FM is a bit too complicated and would only create a huge amount of records. (but I would like to get convinced otherwise)

My question is; Does anyone has experience with integrating a survey management tool like (SurveyMonkey) into their application? And if so, which one did you use, and would you recommend it?
Or maybe someone developed a module like this before in FM and would want to share his knowledge.

I do appreciate all your help.
Thanks.

 

 

 

 

 

[ggt667]

Just do it?

[Christiaan]

Yes, we are working on both at the moment to see what is best.

But i thought maybe someone has done it before and could give us some useful insights 🙂

[ggt667]

Useful insights on what? I mean those 2 or more tasks are not mutually exclusive, that said, if you make these in the same solution, at least I would put their data in separate files for administration purposes. However having relationships to the survey from your core business will most likely give you some synergies in both directions depending on how you structure your data into buckets. The data that most easily comes to mind is how you log activity in your core business solution, how you define a user as logged in, out, and their actions. I did write a grok for elastic filebeat that will give you even more traction logging; its prime purpose being to track user and bandwidth spending over time. However in combination with packet beat can give some pretty interesting statistics: https://github.com/TyrfingMjolnir/Elasticsearch-FileMaker-Logging in which may or may not receive and update for FileMaker 19 Server now that I'm deploying my first FM19S on linux, as an upgrade from FM16S.

There are pieces of data that will give you some knowledge:

• Which layout was the user on when triggering the filling in of survey data
• Which user was logged in and which sequence of actions did bring the user to the point were the user felt like launching the survey; had the user been idle meanwhile, was the user actually logged in? Had the user been reconnected and somehow not been given all credentials, and so on

This in combination with the appropriate ES bucket / query would be able to give a pretty nifty starting point for tracking bugs, SOP-anomalies, and others.

Elasticsearch is not a competing database to FileMaker in any way shape or form, it's an index, however there are some amazing tools that comes with elasticsearch that I personally can not live without; namely its beats: https://www.elastic.co/beats/ whether cloud or on-prem, these logs are amazing, and there are some prebuilt ones there as well, here are some prebuilt filebeats: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/filebeat-modules.html personally I use: Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, nginx, iptables, fortinet, OpenVPN, postfix, and filemaker file beat modules. I guess I should write a keycloak one as well.

Edited August 31, 2021 by ggt667

[bcooney]

It would be helpful to see some specific examples of questions that you’d ask of suppliers and what you intend to do with that data.

If the questions vary as you say, and future questions are somehow unpredictable, then I would suggest a data model similar to the one on this thread, rather than fields per question, think records.

Integration with surveymonkey is certainly an option. You’d need a way to poll for responses or receive the webhook. Dbservices has a demo file here: https://dbservices.com/blog/filemaker-surveymonkey-integration

claris connect has apps for formstack, typeform and woofu (but not survey monkey) https://www.claris.com/connect/apps/?category=forms

you’d still need to create schema to capture the data in FileMaker, if that’s necessary.  Is it?

 

so, the mechanics are achievable, but we need a better understanding of the data to provide an answer  

 @ggt667 I don’t see how logging pertains to the OP’s use case. 

[ggt667]

On 9/5/2021 at 4:49 PM, bcooney said:

 @ggt667 I don’t see how logging pertains to the OP’s use case. 

Part of the survey I assume is for feedback on the solution itself yet optional, hence contextual and meta data will give the developer a flying start.

Edited September 9, 2021 by ggt667