What is possible with the API for managing sharing/survey collaboration? | XM Community
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What is possible with the API for managing sharing/survey collaboration?

  • 6 December 2019
  • 2 replies
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I'm new-ish to using the Qualtrics API, and will be using it more in the near future as I take the helm on working with a set (~130) of existing surveys from a longitudinal research project at a university. One task I will need to do relates to managing collaborators on an existing pool of surveys, and I'm trying to figure out whether I can use the API to do everything in a clean and reliable way.

Here's the things I would like to be able to do right now:

1. Get information about who is shared on any given survey (I will have ownership-level control of any survey)
2. Get information about the permission levels associated with anyone shared on a particuar survey
3. Fix any given survey to a pre-specified list of collaborators who each have a pre-defined permission level, irrespective of the prior list of collaborators and their permissions

It does seem like the "Share Survey" API call (https://api.qualtrics.com/reference#share-survey) provides much of the functionality to do #3. However, it's only sufficient if I can get the information from #1 and #2 on each survey as well--so that I can confirm that the collaborators and permissions have been set appropriately, and that no one is being missed.

Is this possible via any means using the API? Or, alternatively, some combination of the API and any additional tools that might be available to administrators? (I am not an admin, but they'll likely be helpful so long as I know what to ask for.) Ideally I'd like to avoid getting anything directly from the web interface, for reasons of speed and risk of human error.

Two minor side questions:

1. If an existing collaborator's permissions are all set to FALSE, does that remove them as a collaborator? If not, is there some other protocol for this?
2. "Share Survey" is listed as a legacy API call. Is going to go away? Does it have a replacement that either exists or that will be out by some specified date?

2 replies

Any Qualtrics developer care to give response for this ?? Please.

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I spoke directly to them a while back and was essentially told there wasn't enough functionality for my purposes.
There is an endpoint in the API (legacy but still supported) where you can add collaborators and set their permissions:
<<https://api.qualtrics.com/api-reference/reference/surveys.json/paths/~1surveys~1%7BsurveyId%7D~1permissions~1collaborations/post>>
However, there appears to be no monitoring endpoint, so you can't see existing collaborators--which means you can add people, but you can't really ever confirm that only the people/groups you want have access for any given survey, with permissions at the level you intend.
I'm not even sure brand admins have this level of granular review and control, at least not for batch jobs. so if you have something major to review you might have to do it manually via the web. I think that's the end of it, but if anyone finds out something I missed, please let me know, too.

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