Automating block, question, and survey flow creation for a massive survey

Not sure if I missed something here, but wouldn’t it be much easier to add the data the needs to be checked against each participant as meta data?

You could have for example 20 fields for phone numbers in the survey, and then just display them if they got data or not.

So for each user  you would have :

phone1

phone2

phone3… etc.

And then you just load that for each user. I think that is better than having 2K blocks in the survey flow, as it will be a nightmare to test, and even if you only make mistakes in 0.1 of the cases you add or copy something, then you will have at least 2 errors in your setup.

I assume Dominique Noman isn’t a real person

@JesperAndersen It would be great if we could use an approach where the numbers were stored in meta data and displayed relative to the user but there are over 8k unique numbers and the specifications for the survey are to have side by side questions where each row is a number where options can be checked regarding the number’s status. I was looking into autopopulating the side by side questions by piping in values from excel sheets where they are stored but there isnt a straightforward way to do it. Regardless of the setup it seems to be a testing nightmare.

That is test data and not a real person

I’m still not sure I fully understand. How many numbers does each user check?

@MikeW each user has a list of unique numbers that can be anywhere between 1 and 200 numbers long. Most users have around 20 numbers to check.

This might be the same as what @JesperAndersen suggested, but could you not put those numbers as variables in the panel/ directory? You would upload your panel to the directory (unique line for each respondent that has the 1-200 numbers). That way only have to create one block.

Agree with @MikeW here.

@MikeW I had tried uploading an excel sheet which contains the numbers and the managers and piping the values into questions from there but couldn’t get things working. Could you point me to a good example or related tutorial potentially? Thank you.

If you’ve created a list in the directory that has your variables i.e. numbers, then you can reference those in the survey.

Create an embedded variable for each number that matches the variable name in the directory list.

You can then reference that embedded variable in your survey using piping.

To test that it’s pulling the variables from the directory list, you’ll most likely need to use a live individual link (or you can for testing add some variables to the url)

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Thank you @MikeW . I think using this approach could work. I just need to figure out a way to quickly make eight thousand unique embedded variables for each number or how to loop through the directory to populate rows of side by side questions depending on user. now I think.

Will you be sending unique links? i.e. if you go to distributions in your project, then you can create a unique link for each user based on the directory list.

Then, each user will automatically see the numbers assigned to them in the directory list.

e.g. if you refer to phone1 then user 1001 will see the number they have in the directory list under the variable phone1 

This way you should only need 200 variables (as I believe that’s the maximum number of numbers that any one user sees).

I’d suggest you do a couple of simple tests first to familiarise yourself with the directory lists/ creating individual links, and then referring to variables from the directory list.

Hope it goes well.