Not sure how to approach this one. A political candidate has been doing surveys over the last few months. In one district they asked one series of questions, in another district they asked another series of questions. Mostly the questions were same, but sometimes it 5 questions..and sometimes it was 7 questions.

I looked at other posts on handle the situation and I'm not sure if I should set up two tables, one for questions and one for answers. Because I need to be able to show results on a per voter basis, I don't want to display/export a littany of questions that don't have a response for them.

If anyone can get me started I would greatly appreciate it. I'm starting from scratch on this one...

Jess

I think you basically need 3 tables for this: Subjects, Questions and Responses. Responses is a join table between Subjects and Questions - each response indicates who answered what to which question.

What would be in the Subjects table?

In your case, voters.

Comment,

Is this what the Responses table should look like:

ID_Answer

ID_Voter

Question

Response

Uhmm... no. More like:

ID_Question

ID_Voter

Response

To make it more clear:

A survey of 100 subjects, each was asked 5 questions (the same 5 questions)

- Subjects table: 100 records;

- Questions table: 5 records;

- Responses table: 500 records.

Comment,

Thanks once again for the hand holding. I created a Questions table that includes:

ID_Question

Question

Then I created a relationship from Voters Table to Responses Table (via ID_Voter) and another relationship from Responses Table to Questions Table (via ID_Question).

How do I display all the questions asked that voter (with appropriate responses) on a single layout. I can't seem to figure it out with Portal but I can get one question and response to work as a related field.

How do you get all the questions and responses to show up. FYI - I'm trying to place this in a tab control thingy in FM8.

Never mind. I got it right with the portal.

how about a matrix question, how would you deal with that. Would that be another relationship, and how could you report it. Say a 2x6 column.

Q. What were the totals based on ages:

			

Age                           count

Pre-Teen (up to 12)		#

Teen (13-17) 		        #

University  (18-21)		#

Young Adult (22-29)		#

Adult 29 and up 		#

Other 		                #

I'm afraid I don't understand your question.

The following Question Types are from an online survey service, and it is the matrix type, that I would like to be able to emulate, I am just not sure how to approach it.

Ultimately I would like to build a completely dynamic solution, so that, without using define fields, a user could build a survey. Right now base on the above thread, I would assume that the response table will have to have a variety of field types, date, text, repeating, etc. I would also guess that I would have a table for value lists.

For the simple single line, yes/no, question types. I believe the solution is simple. But if I want the matrix type questions, I feel it is going to get complicated.

All the matrix types there, except the last one, are simple checkbox/radio selections. The last one is a drop-down selection - what makes it tricky is that it actually presents two questions (taste & texture) together. But ultimately, structure-wise, it's still one reponse per each subject&question combination - even if a response can have multiple values, e.g. "sweet¶sticky".

I see the complexity more in designing the presentation of the questions. Each question needs to have a type associated with it, as well as an optional list of valid responses (I am not sure that each response also needs a specific field type - I tend to think a single text field could accomodate all). Then, as the user progresses along, each question must select a layout matching its type.

So when you are saying that all matrix records are simple checkbox/radio selections, are you also implying that each row in the matrix is a single record in the question table, and that those questions are grouped by the subject.

So in the case of Matrix - one answer per row

Subject is: "Please rate these brands..."

Question1 is: Skippy

Question2 is: Reese's

Question3 is: Peter Pan

Question4 is: Jif

As for presentation, I am thinking custom web. That way I can assign a html field type to the question, and create page breaks.

I am saying that that's how I would eventually enter it into a database. During the actual survey-taking (the presentation), it can be in any form - as long as it can be later extracted as 4 distinct replies to 4 distinct questions.