I read at:
www.limesurvey.org/forum/design-issues/9...e-url-with-newtest-y

Reading Carsten's reply made me think: what could be a use case for not using newtest/Y in the URL?

Can anyone enlighten me?

Tammo

tammo wrote: Reading Carsten's reply made me think: what could be a use case for not using newtest/Y in the URL?

I'm not the biggest fan of the whole session concept Limesurvey is currently using, but a typical usecase is a browser crash during filling out a survey. Most browsers are able to conserve the session and you can reaccess the survey quite often.

As Jelo says, if you do not use tokens and want your respondents give the possibility to pickup their session, should they close the browser window.

Don't reset already done answers.

Close windows by accident (not browser), ,reopen a window to survey listing, go to survey => your answers are still here.

Reset answers must be self-willed from my point of view. But there are some issue in LS acurrently
1. The question text are in session : bad
2. The survey logic are in session : bad
3. The survey 'column' (of DB) are in session : really , really bad (broke totally survey send)

[edit]
In fact :
- for 1+2 : need a good cache system (we must NOT contruct survey for each page)
- for 3 : we must have better control value from fieldMap

[edit2]
in www.limesurvey.org/forum/design-issues/9...ith-newtest-y#110193 iscar ask

i don't understand ,why not start new session as default setting?

Answer : because user loose all his answers on each page, and start the survey at first page again and again ....

Do we know how necessary this is?

Could it also be something that we indicate in the backend and which then makes use of another URL for starting the survey (also in email templates)?

tammo wrote: Do we know how necessary this is?

Where is this heading to? To keep the session is the default behaviour for a proband filling out the survey.

In the backend (at least in the current state of LimeSurvey) you want a fresh session for testing things.
I always use a different browser when I'm logged into the backend to test frontend things. Do often things happend in the frontend when testing often even with Newtest=Y.

Your last post seems to indicate that you would like to see some change around newtest=Y in certain URLS, right?
If yes, why?

I just thought that being able to change this might help development.

Furthermore I was still confused by several answers, because some seemed to indicate that using newtest/Y would only show the first page over and over again.

For other use, like a computer that is being used by many people, say at a conference, keeping the session might be bad practice, because when someone breaks of, goes away, the next person might see the answers by the previous person.

So the usage of newtest/Y might at some point be very good and at other situation unwanted. Things are getting clearer now, but what I need in order to understand things, is to be able to translate the technical concepts in real life situations.

Tammo

Exactly, new test is good when you want to use one computer to fill many questionnaires, especially when not using tokens. So a kiosk setup would be one example.

newtest does not only show the first page over and over again. If you open the survey again it guarantees that you do not start with the leftovers of a previous respondent or test.

It is getting clearer and clearer. Thanks Holch!

Knowing this I would like to make this knowledge more visible in the Administrative UI (A-UI) and give the administrator some options to construct the start URL. Are there more options (apart from pre-filling with some variables)?

Tammo

tammo wrote: Knowing this I would like to make this knowledge more visible in the Administrative UI (A-UI) and give the administrator some options to construct the start URL. Are there more options (apart from pre-filling with some variables)?

The infos about Start-URL can be improved. At least the different ways of shorten the URL would be useful to display. Some demo links could be shown when working with the panel integration dialog. I am not aware of any special URL flags beside newtest.

Many admins just copied the URL via rightclick from the backend. That way newtest=Y is somestimes distributed to probands.

When using LimeSurvey in a kiosk environment you will use a browser which resets from time to time.
If people want to stop the survey and go away, they could use the default LimeSurvey button at the bottom which clears the answers and resets the survey session.
If newtest=Y is available, there should be newtest=N available. So a config setting to change the default behavior might be possible to add.