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Sometimes you need to think outside the box to solve particular tasks. This chapter introduces some typical situations.
A simple registration form for students will serve as an example:
However, the devil is in the details. The following paragraphs give attention to what cannot be seen at first glance.
Sooner or later a questionnaire is needed. In case you have not created one, yet, click on Compose Questionnaire on the left and create a new questionnaire using the following settings:
Leave the other settings unchanged and save the questionnaire by clicking OK. Subsequently, the section “Questionnaire Pages” is displayed.
There are various possibilities to embed texts within the questionnaire – and to embed them nearly anywhere. Details can be found in the chapter Using Texts in the Questionnaire. Usually, you will use the following procedure.
Tip: Following, HTML code will often be mentioned. This is text containing formating. In case you need formatted texts (multiple paragraphs, headings, line breaks, bold, italic, etc.), read the chapter Using Texts in the Questionnaire.
To create a new text element or question, you need to leave the user interface for composing the questionnaire and return to it afterwards. This is annoying in the long run. To work more smoothly, you can use several browser tabs.
If you are currently composing the questionnaire, click on List of Questions or Text Elements and Labels using the right (!) mouse button to open the context menu. Select Open link in new tab (or similar, depending on your browser).
Note for Mac users: In case you are working with a Mac, you may not have a right mouse button. In this case, hold the CTRL button and click the menu item.
Now you have opened two areas of the program. Depending on the browser this will look slightly different. Using the tabs you can switch between these areas.
Henceforth, when creating a new question or text element, you will notice that the element is not displayed in the “Compose Questionnaire” tab. The solution is fairly simple: click the Reload button to display any new questions and text elements.
In contrast to the registration form above, most questionnaires start with a friendly welcome page. The procedure is similar to adding a heading:
To add the text input fields (question 1: surname, first name etc in the example above), you need to create a question of the type Text input.
It is usually sensible to define the Label Width, e.g. “180” pixels in the example above.
For the selection (question: Main subject), you need another question of the type Selection.
For text input fields you can individually define the height and width. If you do not enter a height, text input fields are one row high and do not allow multi-line input.
To make the text field smaller, simply define the Width of the text input field - “32” pixels in the example above.
The last item of the personal details is a dropdown selection. Although it doesn't look like it on the registration form, this is a separate question.
It is not visibly a separate question, because it is directly attached to the previous question. To do that, the previous question must not have any spacing - this can be set either via the settings for question items (see Concatenating Questions) or by using the argument “spacing=0” in the question() command (see Introduction to PHP). At the same time, the attached question must not display a question title (setting or argument “notitle”).
question('SD01', 'spacing=0'); // Personal Data question('SD03', 'notitle'); // Gender question('SD02'); // Main Subject
The code must contain the correct question IDs. In this example, these are SD01 to SD03.
After (automatically) saving the questionnaire, you can test it and have look at the preliminary result.