Survey cleanup option needed | XM Community
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I had a survey with probably 20-30 blocks within it and probably 500 question fields. Due to workflow issues I was forced to break apart the survey and serve each block in individual surveys. So I would copy the survey to preserve the survey template settings then remove most of the blocks and repeat. The problem I observed once I began looking at the actual survey export file was that these smaller survey projects, that only showed one block in the editor, still had all of these other blocks lying around in the shadows within the survey (not in the trash but in the survey export). This is a BIG problem if you are working with the API on say the 'Get Survey' call and trying to optimize queries to a bloated survey file that you are not able to scrub of all the questions you thought you had deleted from your project. Is anyone else having this problem?



Is there a plan to have the software clean up the project of questions and data that were supposedly deleted from the project so the survey export actually matches what is presented in the editor? It not only causes performance issues having these 'deleted' items still residing in the project, it also makes using the survey export file as a data dictionary much more of a pain to work with because you are forced to spend time parsing out only the questions and responses that are being used to collect data. If there is an existing 'cleanup' option then please let me know.
Hi @"w.patrick.gale"! We have heard of a slight lag between deleting questions in your survey and using the 'Get Survey' API call. Do you still experience this after waiting some time? Otherwise, please reach out to our Integrations team so they can further troubleshoot this with you!
Hi @LaurenK, sorry that does not answer my question. Lag in deleting questions is not the issue. I have surveys where questions are still appearing on the backend (from looking at the survey export file) but do not appear in the trash bin or in the front-end survey editor and are causing the surveys to be more bloated than they should be. This is why I requested a 'clean-up' feature to that would help to ensure that what is being kept with the survey matches what is presented on the front-end. I had to rebuild surveys because the backend seemed to be corrupted with phantom questions and responses.



This probably occurs when copying surveys and then removing some blocks but I haven't run tests to try and duplicate the problems.
Hi @"w.patrick.gale"! This does not sound like intended functionality, and so I would recommend reaching out to our Support team so they can properly file this as either a product issue or feature request!



If this is a new product idea, if you have not yet already, I’d recommend posting this in our Product Ideas category, as it is a feature not already developed by our team. Be sure to review the How to Write a Good Product Idea template and our Ideation Guidelines before you post your idea!
Thanks @LaurenK. I had emailed this to the support team but it did not appear they had a desire to fix it or send it along to the engineering team, so I wanted to let others know of the issue. Their suggestion of simply 'rebuilding' a survey to get around the issue is not ideal, especially if it involves surveys with a good deal of custom settings and configurations that are not easily reconfigured. I especially do not want to go through rebuilding a survey and then find out the back-end is corrupt again without a way to fix it.
Hey @"w.patrick.gale"! We're sorry you've experienced that. We've been in touch with the Product Specialist you worked with and they will be reaching out shortly!

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