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To edit an item, either click on the item in the Survey pane or click on the Item overflow icon for the item and choose Edit from the menu that appears. In both cases this opens the Question Details overlay for the item.
Note: When you log in to and open a survey you have worked on previously, when you go to the Survey Designer page you will automatically be taken directly to the item or node you last worked on. If no previous item is registered then you will be taken to the first item in the survey.
The Question Details overlay contains a number of fields and options depending on the type of question. The properties are described in the Question Properties documentation (go to Accessing Question Properties for more information). Note that you can re-size the Question Details overlay as required to provide more space for your texts etc.; drag the right border.
All questions are given a Question identification (qid) when they are created (go to Question ID for more information). This is an automatically generated, alphanumeric string with no spaces, starting with a letter. You may replace the system-generated id with your own; click on the qid edit icon to open the field and edit the qid as required. The qid displayed in the Survey pane is updated automatically. Note that the maximum length for question IDs is 50 characters.
All questions have a Title and a Text field, and the majority also have an Instructions field.
- Title - the title of the question. The title appears in the Survey pane, and it functions as the heading for the question on the survey page in a web survey. It also appears as a descriptive label for the question when used in Reportal. The length of the title can be maximum 255 characters, otherwise it will be truncated. When a title is not provided, Text will be used as a title.
- Text - the question text.
- Instructions - here you can type in any descriptive instructions or comments you may wish to provide to the respondent.
Note: You can use text substitution (piping) in all text fields but not in script nodes, conditions, code/column masks or validation code fields (go to Text Substitution or Response Piping for more information).
Note: If you need to add a lot of text to a text field you can resize the field - drag the lower edge. The size of the text fields is remembered for all questions in the survey.
These fields have a text formatting toolbar (go to Formatting Text for more information).
The fields also support HTML. To use this, click the Show HTML Source button on the toolbar.
Figure 1 - Example of a text field showing the HTML source code
Important
The texts for answer items that have an "Other" field should not contain HTML code.
Editing Details For Multiple Items
When you select multiple items in a survey (go to Selecting Multiple Items in a Survey for more information) and then click the Details option, the question details pages for all the selected items are presented in the editing page in the order in which they appear in the survey. The number of items selected is displayed at the top of the page, and the selected items are highlighted in the Survey pane.
You can now edit the items as required, and all changes are auto-saved. Note that you cannot change texts in multiple items simultaneously; changes must be made individually for each item.
To reduce the amount of space each item takes in the editing area, answer, prompt and scale item lists are initially closed. If you wish to view or edit these, you can open them by clicking the links in the details pages.
Editing Properties for Multiple Items
When you select multiple items in a survey (go to Selecting Multiple Items in a Survey for more information) and then click the Properties option, a page listing the properties that are common to all the selected survey items opens in the Design area. The number of survey items selected is displayed at the top of the page, and the selected items are highlighted in the Survey pane.
Figure 2 - Editing the properties for multiple survey items
- Click on the Update property switch for a property you wish to update and then make the required setting for that property, or change the property and the switch will change automatically.
- On completion, click Save changes.
Note: Changes made using this "multi-selection" functionality are not saved automatically.