My company writes a lot of surveys. Historically this process has consisted of someone writing a survey in word, and then someone else converting the content in word into a survey in Qualtrics (via copy and pasting and is very manual and time intensive). We have built a tool that takes a survey from word, following very specific formatting requirements, and then converts that to a QSF file based on the Qualtrics QSF (JSON) file content and structure. This generated QSF file can then be uploaded to Qualtrics and will result in a survey (with a few simple components in place, like question type, force response on, formatting including bolding, italics, etc.). The idea behind the tool we have built is to remove the process of taking a survey from Word to Qualtrics by writing it in a format that can go directly to Qualtrics.



The challenge we are facing is Qualtrics QSF content and structure is constantly changing / evolving. Most of those changes have not caused a problem with our tool, but in some instances a generated QSF file will no longer meet QSF structure requirements, and will return an error. We then have to go through the manual process of writing a survey in Qualtrics, downloading the QSF, and comparing the QSF file structure to see what is different and how we can remedy that to get the tool working again. One example is we previously used UTF-8 code for apostrophes and quotation marks, but then Qualtrics updated and now functionally uses ' apostrophes and \\" for Quotation marks in the QSF file. Once we made the change, the tool worked again, but it took time to identify then make the change.



I have thought up a few potential solutions to this and would be open to others as each of these depends on Qualtrics.



1. Having access to Qualtrics that tracks / notes some of the QSF changes, so we can know what the changes are and can repair the tool to meet the new structural requirements.

2. Having some type of API check that can upload a QSF file, check it against Qualtrics formatting requirements in order to be "eligible" to upload the QSF, and then identify a line in the QSF (JSON) file that is causing the error preventing the tool from uploading to Qualtrics.

3. Have Qualtrics stick to an "old" version of code for the users within my company, so the tool will continue to work sans any new updates Qualtrics is making on their end



I am open to other thoughts and suggestions on how to go about solving this. Qualtrics noted they do not currently have any solutions in place that could help and suggested the Community might be a good place to start.