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Question type - Array by column

From LimeSurvey Manual

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Short description

This question type is the same as an array, except the subquestion and answer axes are swapped.


Example: Array by column example.zip


Please note that no relevance equation can be used in the subquestion fields located on the X-scale.

General options

Mandatory

Description

This option allows the survey administrators to request their respondents to answer certain survey questions. If the mandatory questions are not answered, the respondents will not be able to proceed further. If you have a question with multiple subquestions, and you require only certain subquestions to be answered, use the minimum answer attribute located under the Logic tab.

If you use any of the preinstalled themes and the mandatory question attribute is enabled, a red asterisk will be shown next to the question. If you wish to hide it, please check these instructions.


Available options

  • On - Question must be answered before the participant can proceed to the next page - the answer option 'No answer' is never shown.
  • Soft - If the question is not answered, a warning is shown when trying to proceed to the next page - however, the participant can choose to ignore the warning and proceed. Note that the 'No answer' option is still shown (if activated in survey presentation settings)
  • Off (default) - Question can be left unanswered


Condition (previously "Relevance equation")

Description

If the result value of the condition is "1" or "true", the question is "relevant" in the survey context, i.e. it is shown to the survey participant. If not, the question is hidden. Any survey question allows you to specify a relevance equation. This function is the successor of conditions and supports much more complex conditional logic.

Syntax Highlighting

Whenever you save the condition, it is evaluated and syntax-highlighted. Any errors will be color coded so that you can quickly detect and fix them.

 Hint: To check if all conditions are used correctly within your survey, read about our show logic file feature.


Valid values

  • Any condition that makes use of the ExpressionScript syntax, without surrounding curly braces.

Examples

Here are good examples of syntax highlighting.


Display

Answer width (answer_width)

Description

This value sets the answer column width by using a percentage system. For example, if you type in this field 40, then 40 percent of the width of the question will be used for answers. The remaining width will be equally divided between the subquestions.

Valid values

  • Any integer value from 1 to 100.


Hide tip (hide_tip)

Description

Most questions will usually include a tip that says "Please choose one of the following options" or a hint text on how to fill out the question. This attribute allows you to turn off or on this tips/hints.

These tips/hints include validation criteria messages (such as min/max number of answers, min/max/equals sum value). If hide_tip is enabled, these messages will be hidden. However, if the user enters invalid data, the tips will appear. They will be coloured in red, getting changed to green once the validation criteria are met.

Available options

  • On - the tips/hints are hidden;
  • Off (default).



Random answer order (random_order)

Description

  Deprecated for Answer Options : As of 5.5.0, this attribute is not longer used for ordering answer options. Please see QS:Answer_order


This attribute causes LimeSurvey to ignore the existing order of answer options/subquestions, and instead it orders them randomly. This option permits the survey creator to diminish the survey bias. Please note that if a question has subquestions, the order of subquestions will be randomized, not the order of the answer options.

Available options

  • Yes - Randomize when participant enters survey
  • No (default)


Question theme (question_theme)

Description

It allows you to use customized themes for the respective question.

Available options

  • Your created question themes which are located under the Question themes in the Themes panel.

See: Question themes

Note: This feature is under development at the moment.


Always hide this question (hidden)

Description

If enabled, the question will always be hidden - it will not be displayed to the survey participants. This function can be used in the following scenarios:

  • If you wish to prefill a question with a URL and you want not to have it displayed on the screen. This overrides any conditions used within the survey because the respective question will not even be embedded on the page.
  • If you wish to store or calculate a value on the fly via the ExpressionScript - Presentation.
Note: A common question type that is used with this function is the Equation one.

Available options

  • On
  • Off (default)


CSS class (css_class)

Description

If you want to add special CSS classes to certain questions, you can enter the CSS class name(s) in this box. Make sure you leave an empty space between different class names.

Valid values

  • Any text string with a space between different CSS class names.
 Hint: You can also insert an expression in this box (New in 3.0.0 ). Remember that the output of the expression will not be updated dynamically.


  According to the W3C, CSS class names can contain only the characters [a-zA-Z, and 0-9] and ISO 10646 characters U+00A1 and higher, plus the hyphen (-) and the underscore (_). They cannot start with a digit, or a hyphen followed by a digit. LimeSurvey encodes CSS classes, but it does not fix it totally.



Relevance help for printable survey (printable_survey_relevance_help)

Description

If you wish to print a survey, you can also print the relevance equations for each question. But, if you wish to offer instead an explanation rather than the expression on the printed form, fill in this box with the text explanation for the relevance equation.

Valid values

  • Any text and/or numbers you wish to be displayed on the printable form.


Logic

Randomization group name (random_group)

Description

It places the questions into a specified randomization group, all questions included in the specified group being displayed in a random order to the survey respondents.

You can find a sample survey using randomization group name in ExpressionScript sample survey.

Valid values

Just enter any string you like (for example: 'group1'). All question which have set the same string within the randomization group name box will have their place in the survey randomized (=randomly exchanged among each other).


Preview To preview the questions use the preview survey instead of the preview question group function, as the second has been reported to not show the questions in a randomized order.



Question validation equation (em_validation_q)

Description

This is an equation that is used to validate the entire question (e.g, all of its parts collectively for a multi-answer question). If the question fails the validation criteria, then em_validation_q_tip message will be displayed (it uses the CSS style .error). This tip uses the .em_q_fn_validation CSS style, which is hidden by default within template.css.

The main difference between this feature and the subquestion validation equations (em_validation_sq option) is that for this feature, if the question (or question parts) fail validation, then an error message could be shown. For the subquestion validation, each text entry cell (e.g., in an array question type, but it can also be applied to single entry question types) will be styled so that the background color is (light) red.

Valid values

  • Any equation that makes use of the ExpressionScript syntax, without surrounding curly braces.

Example

  • You want to collect demographic information from users via a multiple short text question, and you want to validate that the user has entered a valid email address and phone number.

This example shows how the question looks with invalid answers:

And here is what it looks like with one invalid answer:

Here is how you edit a question to enter that information:

And here is part of the Show Logic File output that lets you check the accuracy of your expression and ensure that there are no syntax errors:

As you can see, the validation equation tests that both the email and phone number are either empty or match a regular expression filter.

The validation tip only shows the warning message if the phone or email appears invalid.

 Hint: In order to create complex validation messages, read about the usage of the ExpressionScript.


If you wish to import the example from above into your LimeSurvey installation, download the following .lsq file: Em_validation_q_example.zip.

 Hint: Remember, LimeSuvey uses the Perl syntax for regular expressions, so they should start and end with / (slash character)!



Tip for whole question validation equation (em_validation_q_tip)

Description

If you are using the question validation equation, you can use this box in order to display an optional message as question tip on how the question has to be filled out.

Valid values

Example

See the example from the question validation equation wiki section- it shows how the tip can be tailored to show which parts of a multiple short text question fail the validation criteria.


Other

Insert page break in printable view (page_break)

Description

This attribute is only active when you actually print a survey from the Printable View. It forces a page break before the question.

Available options

  • On
  • Off (default)



SPSS export scale type (scale_export)

Description

This is used for SPSS export only. This attribute overrides the default scale guessed by SPSS. To learn what the different measurement scales do, please read the related SPSS documentation.

Available options

  • Default (default)
  • Nominal
  • Ordinal
  • Scale


Statistics

Show in public statistics (public_statistics)

Description

This attribute allows the survey administrator to chose if a particular question results should be displayed to the survey participants after they submitted the survey.

Note: To have the statistics displayed on the last page, do not forget to enable this functionality from the presentation & navigation settings. Otherwise, no statistics link will be displayed at the end of your survey.

The default setting for each question is 'Off' (=Do not show the question statistics to the respondents). You have to enable this for every single question if you want to show the survey statistics of that (those) particular question(s) to the survey participants after the survey submission.

Available options

  • On
  • Off (default)



Display chart (display_chart)

Description

This attribute allows the survey administrator to choose if a chart that contains the question results should be displayed to the survey participants after they filled out the survey.

Note: To have the chart displayed on the last page, you have to enable the following options:


Available options

  • On
  • Off (default)



Chart type (chart_type)

Description

This attribute allows the survey administrator to choose which type of chart will be displayed to the respondent once he/she finished filling out the survey.

Note: Do not forget to change the question and survey settings in order to have the charts displayed at the end on the survey. For more details, check the wiki section on the display chart question attribute.

Available options

  • Bar chart
  • Pie chart
  • Radar
  • Line
  • PolarArea
  • Doughnut
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