Github and survey solution designer

#1

Hi, is there any way to link the designer with github, should be nice to track all changes made to the questionnaire up to the final version.

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#2

I’m really interested in the answer to this great question–particularly, if the dev team sees a more elegant way or something more akin to a CI/CD pipleine.

I do see a crude way of doing this:

  1. Export the questionnaire in JSON format. This comes when you export data from your data collection server with metadata.
  2. Post the questionnaire to GitHub, since JSON is simply a plain text document
  3. Rinse and repeat as the questionnaire evolves.
#3

The short answer is no - all data, including questionnaire documents are stored in a database (not always in a ‘single document’ format but distributed/normalized based on the application need).

Manual way, as @arthurshaw2002 suggested is possible, just as a coincidence I was thinking exactly the same question yesterday, (export) and then accumulate questionnaire versions as versioned files.

If you think of ‘just’ storing files, git/github doesn’t have any special advantage over onedrive/dropbox etc files storage. If the offline backup is the main goal, periodically dumping the questionnaire package, (naming it appropriately) and storing somewhere would work.

But if you really want to take advantage of visualizing the differences between versions, then unfortunately (or at least in my opinion) json doesn’t serve you well, it is to verbose - you move one question (and can see this in the Designer history as ‘question moved’) and in json diff you will be presented that a section is missing in one part of the (large) file and new section is added in the other. To get the same conclusion that question was moved you will have to make bigger mental effort looking at the raw json.

I’d think that having ‘better’ history inside the Designer would be helpful to me - when I add/modify validation expression, instead of seeing ‘question was updated’ it would be great to see the change in the validation string, same applies when I change type, question text, etc etc. As Designer application ‘knows’ at the moment of registering the change what exactly was affected. Recovering the same meaning from json files, although possible, would be too much hassle to do outside…

#4

Good point, @zurab , about JSON being so verbose and the diffs probably difficultly to interpret.

If “better” history in Designer is of interest, here’s an old feature request. Hopefully better ideas will previal than my modest suggestions.

#5

thanks @zurab and @arthurshaw2002, this is field with potential to work in the future. Now, that I see you are currently working in Designer. I wonder if there are courses to improve my skills in this tool?