The specific use case we will cover is populating one survey with data from another. If you aren't using a previous Alchemer survey to pre-populate you can jump to Step 3: Preparing Your Data File for Upload.
Imagine the HR team at Alchemer ran an employee happiness survey last year. This year they wish to re-run the employee happiness survey in order to ask new, follow-up questions of employees who responded last year. For these returning respondents, they wish to have last year's data available in the same data file in order to analyze what aspects of employee happiness improved and what aspects did not.
In addition, because a whole year has gone by, there are a number of new employees that will need to answer the original survey questions. Again, the HR team wants to have this information in the same data file for analysis, so they want to use the same survey to collect responses from new employees.
Now, because we want the data from last year's responses, we need to export the data from last year's survey. We are using the CSV/Excel option found via the Results > Exports tab on last year's survey .
As far as the number of fields you can upload for pre-population, there's not an exact limit. However, the login/password action may fail for very large files. File size is determined by the number of columns and rows. If you think your file is too big, it probably is!
The final step is to set up logic so that new respondents only see the original survey questions and returning respondents only see the follow-up questions. Before we jump into this though, it's a good idea to test our pre-population to ensure that the data is present.
To do so, we can add a dummy password with some dummy data to our Login/Password action. We'll then take the survey, log in with our dummy password, and confirm that all of our original survey questions from the previous survey are populating.
Once we have confirmed the pre-population is working, we are ready to set up logic to determine who sees what questions. In our example, we want returning respondents to only see and answer the new follow-up questions added to the survey. We also want for new respondents to only see and answer the original survey questions.
To set up this type of logic, it is easiest to have the original and follow-up questions on separate pages. There can be as many pages for each portion of the survey as you need; we just want to ensure that original and follow-up questions are not on the same page.
In some cases you might want to allow respondents to see and edit their answers. To set this up, you can add a question asking returning respondents if they wish to review and edit their previous responses. You can then use this question to set up skip logic to jump the respondents who answered "no" straight to the new survey questions.
Or, if you wish to have all returning respondents review their previous answers, you can add a Text/Instruction Element to your survey explaining that the beginning of their survey will show the answers from last year which they can edit if they wish.
Communicating with external systems, websites, or custom pages allows a unique method for pre-populating your survey by interacting with external databases of information, whether stored in one of our partner's websites or building a custom interaction to your own company. In almost all cases, you can send data from the survey to populate the external databases as well! The following tutorials provide more information about third-party integrations:
URL Variables are values that can be added to the end of the survey link that pass a name/value pair, such as "firstname=Derek." Within your surveys you can access and use values passed via query strings by using the [url("xxx")] merge code, which could look like the following: [url("firstname")]. This merge code would populate with whatever value ('Bob' in the above example) was passed in the "firstname" query string.
Survey Solutions server administratormay adjust the server settings. These settings affect simultaneously all surveysand all users in a particular workspace on the server and have the effectimmediately when applied.
The field password must be populated with a valid password for encryption totake effect. There is no default password. To ensure the password is strong,the program generates one automatically. A new password can be generated byclicking on the refresh button.
Simple: You factory default the AP by using a PIN in the small hole (hold for at least 12 seconds) and your AP will boot in normal mode connecting to the dashboard en retrieving it's configuration. It won't be in survey mode anymore.
If you cannot identify the account owner who originally used the authentication code, then you will need to contact the Census Bureau. Refer to your letter for the appropriate telephone number to call.
If you are not the appropriate person to complete this survey, and have not yet entered the authentication code found in your letter, please forward the letter to the appropriate person in your company.
If the Census Bureau has recently mailed you a letter containing a user ID and password, you will need to follow the directions found in that letter. This system is only compatible with surveys that are using authentication codes. All of our economic surveys will eventually migrate to using authentication codes, but for the time being two separate systems exist.
To set up the email and password authentication:
That would almost work in a CalculateField code block. The license plate comes into the function as "a", and a.encode() is doing some conversion thing to the string so that it's acceptable to hashlib. That is "a" is the string variable that will have the original license plate in it.
If you want to keep the contents of the column so you can re-run it instead of transforming once and all the original plates are gone forever it would look like this, you can see the table has 2 columns "plate" and "encrypted" and I am doing the Calc on the "encrypted" column and feeding the "fn()" function with the contents of the "plate" column.
TL;DR About the math, the function is one-way, which means with the same input it should always produce the same output, but it can't go the other direction. Given the hash you can't get the license plate. They use this for storing passwords. When you log in, the password you type gets pushed through the hash function, and then the result is compared with the stored hash from a table or database. If they match, you typed it correctly, but anyone who steals the password table cannot see your password. This is why sysadmins say "I can reset your password for you but I can't tell you what the old one was."
A launched and open survey can be completed by anyone who knows the survey web address (public URL). You can restrict access to your survey with a password that your respondents have to enter before beginning the survey.
Note: This basic protection means all your respondents will use the same password. It does not prevent respondents from submitting multiple entries. To find out how to restrict survey access with individual user credentials, see our tutorial on controlling who can complete your survey.
You can change or clear the password while the survey is open, and you can do this as many times as you like. If you change the password your respondents will no longer be able to use the original password to access the survey.