Conditional display upon iteration in loop | XM Community
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Conditional display upon iteration in loop

  • 18 October 2019
  • 6 replies
  • 159 views
D
Hi, I was wondering if someone could help me with the following:
I have a loop & merge item of which the order is randomized. I'd like to show a descriptive text question in all iterations except for the first (i.e. "You are going to answer these sets of questions another time ..."). Is there I way I can 'tap into' the loop counter using display logic? The only option I found in there is selecting a specific loop item in which the question should be displayed, but the fact that my loop is randomized makes this unusable.

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I'd suggest using JavaScript. Here's what I'm picturing:

1 - Create an embedded data field in your survey flow and set it default to 1.
2 -On the screen the text displays on, add something like a span to put the display text into:

`<span id="descText"> </span>`

3 -onReady you do something like this:

`var loopnum = "${e://Field/loopnum}";//Embedded data loop counter`
`if(loopnum<2) { //If this is the first loop then...`
` document.getElementById('descText').innerHTML = "";`
`} else { //Otherwise this is not the first loop so we display the text...`
` document.getElementById('descText').innerHTML = "You are going to answer these sets of questions another time...";`
`}`

4 - onPageSubmit at the end of the loop you will want to do something like this to increment the counter:

`Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnPageSubmit(function() `
`{`
` var loopnum = "${e://Field/loopnum}";`
` loopnum = loopnum+1;`
` Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.setEmbeddedData("loopnum", loopnum);`
`});`
D
Thanks, I already solved this with a similar solution, without using javascript but some smart usage of embedded data fields.
G

dschreij I am curious to know how you solved this since I have the same problem!

D

I don't remember exactly to which survey this question related to exactly, as I've created a lot of similar surveys with complex loop structures in the meantime. If I remember correctly, if I didn't want to show a question on a certain iteration, I used this piece of code:
Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnload(function()
{
/*Place your JavaScript here to run when the page loads*/
});

Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnReady(function()
{
/*Place your JavaScript here to run when the page is fully displayed*/
if (parseInt("${lm://CurrentLoopNumber}") === 1) {
jQuery("#"+this.questionId).hide();
this.clickNextButton()
}
});
where the number after the 

===
of course corresponds to the iteration you want to skip. Basically this script simply hides the question from view and clicks the next button, effectively skipping the slide.

G

dschreij Thanks, how do I change it so that it does that for a range of values, or merely for all loop counts under/over a certain value?

Is it something like ==< ? I am not familiar with using three equal signs in this manner.

D

Haha yes, that's a JavaScript thingy (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Comparison_Operators) but you might as well use double quotes in this situation. You could use a range operator as you suggested. If you really only want to skip the display on specified iterations, you could use

if ([20, 40, 60].includes(parseInt("${lm://CurrentLoopNumber}"))) {...}
Beware though that the includes method does/did not exist on Internet Explorer yet, so this will only work in modern browsers (which people should use anyway).

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