Its been a bit slow over summer.  We are now announcing the july release and yet we are already into August.

Changes include:

• rank question type
• randomize appearance on select questions

Rank Question Type

This is just like a select multiple question except instead of choosing one or more options you can order them.

Adding to your survey

Specify in an XLS Form in the same way you specify a select multiple question except that you replace “select_multiple” with “rank”. Then you have a space and the list name that points to all the choices that you want to rank. So:
        type                          name                           label
rank my_list             question_name          Rank this list!

In the online editor select the question type called “rank” and then add the choices.

Using

The rank question works in FieldTask and WebForms.  In both devices you drag the choices into the order that you want.

Rank Question in WebForms

Analysis

If you export the data into an XLS report you will see that the ranked questions are shown in a similar way to select multiples with a column per choice.  However the column headings are the question name – the rank.  And the contents are the name of the choice.

Answers to a rank question in an XLS report.

Limitations

Not all exports support rank yet. The support in the API is also limited.  You also can’t currently use it in filters. For example get all data where london was marked as the first choice.

Randomize

If you add an appearance of randomize=true for a select or rank question then in fieldTask and WebForms the order in which the choices are shown will be randomised.  This can be useful to reduce the impact of bias in choice selection on the survey results.   Randomize currently only works on FieldTask and not on Webforms. No it works in webforms too.  Thanks to Alexander Torrado for picking this up.

Bugs Fixed

• Choices pulled from another form were not showing in webforms.  If you looked up choices in a CSV file then these did show in webforms however if the choices were in another form they did not.

Update 8th August 2018 to add the bugs fixed section and to note that randomize works with webforms but you need to set it as a parameter and not in appearance.