Headquarters
Audio audit
Description Audio auditing enables audio recording of the interviewing process for quality control. Audio auditing automatically records the full interview for selected assignments, stores the recording in encrypted audio files, and synchronizes these audio files along with the linked interview files. It is not possible to record only parts of an interview, but it is possible to select which assignments will be recorded. How to enable/disable audio auditing Before creating an assignment In the main menu of the Headquarters navigate to Survey Setup > Questionnaires; Click on a questionnaire; In the context menu that appears, select Details; Click in the box next to Record audio to enable audio auditing.
March 19, 2023Exposed Variables
Exposed variables are special variables that are made available by Survey Solutions for speedy access that can be utilized for the filtering of observations in the interviews lists and map reports. All questions and variables from the cover page of any questionnaire are automatically considered to be exposed and no action needs to be undertaken by the user to expose them. In addition the user may expose up to 15 questions or variables from the main level of the questionnaire (the interview level).
May 11, 2021Server Audit Log
Survey Solutions server administrator may inspect the server audit log. The audit log lists important events that were initiated by the users on the server, identifying who made that action, and when. For actions of interviewers, see the detailed actions log. To view the server audit log, the admin user should proceed to Menu → Administration → Audit log. The log data can be exported in a form of a downloadable file in any of the following formats:
December 17, 2020Import the Questionnaire
A questionnaire document prepared in the Designer site needs to be imported to the Survey Solutions data server before the data collection may start in that survey. This article outlines how to import a questionnaire from the Designer to the HQ. 🛈 The questionnaire import operation is available to users in HQ or administrator roles. In the main menu select Survey setup, then Questionnaires. Click the Import questionnaire button. Enter the Designer credentials under which you’ve designed your questionnaire.
August 22, 2020Questionnaire Details Page
Questionnaire details page reflects information about the questionnaire that has been earlier imported to the Headquarters. You access it by clicking a questionnaire in the list of imported questionnaires (Survey Setup/Questionnaires) Notably, the information properties reflect the structure of the questionnaire as designed (number of sections, rosters, questions, etc) and the information about how the questionnaire is configured at the Headquarters (whether the web mode is on, whether the audio recording is turned on for new assignments, etc).
November 19, 2019Components of the Headquarters Software
The headquarters software is a suite of connected tools for the administrator and headquarters users: to track the overall progress of the survey (Reports) to review completed interviews (Interviews) to manage the human resources (Teams and Roles) to specify survey instruments, create survey assignments with those instruments(Survey Setup) to export the data collected from these assignments (Data Export) to find a check the status of particular case assignments (Troubleshooting) The difference between the headquarters and administrator users is that the administrator can create headquarters/observer user accounts, archive user accounts, and delete questionnaire templates from the headquarters server.
June 29, 2016Distributing Assignments to Interviewers
Step 1 Log in to your server using a supervisor account. If you are testing Survey Solutions, log in at demo.mysurvey.solutions using a supervisor account. Step 2 Once the supervisor’s dashboard has loaded, select the Assignments tab. The list of assignments can be filtered by questionnaire template, person responsible, and/or archived status. From the list of assignments, the supervisor the supervisor should select the assignments that they would like to assign to one of their enumerators.
June 28, 2016Admin Settings
Survey Solutions server administrator may adjust the server settings. These settings affect simultaneously all surveys and all users in a particular workspace on the server and have the effect immediately when applied. These settings are visible only to the user logged in in an administrative role and can be accessed from: Menu → Administration → click particular workspace name → Settings. Export Encryption This group of settings contains settings that control the encryption of the data archive produced when exporting the data from Survey Solutions.
May 17, 2023Healthcheck
Survey Solutions server administrator has access to the special healthcheck page using the following: menu → Administration → Diagnostics. The health check diagnostics page shows: Overall server health status. Results of diagnostic checks. Server metrics. Statistics by workspace of the server. Overall server health check The following can be the statuses for the healthcheck: Healthy (green) - export service is responding and can access headquarters; Degraded (yellow) - export service is not answering; Unhealthy (red) - export service cannot access headquarters; Results of diagnostic checks.
April 27, 2023Demo server
Survey Solutions developers team provides a special demo server equipped with the latest version of the Survey Solutions Headquarters for the users that want to: explore the interface of the software, try different roles, test pre-loading data files, see the new features added in a recent release. It is important to understand that this server may not be utilized for real survey data collection, because this server is a public server that anyone in the world can access, and also because the demo server is also periodically cleared (erazed), when it accumulates a lot of old surveys or users that are no longer active, usually once a month.
April 10, 2023Server storage space
This article explains the importance of adequate storage space for a Survey Solutions server. Survey Solutions saves a lot of data. Database sizes in the size of tens of GBs are commonly observed even in small surveys. Population censuses may consume TBs of data. Survey Solutions stores the data: in the database and in files on file system of the server. It is crucial that the system doesn’t run out of storage for its continuous and reliable operation.
April 5, 2023Procedures for maintenance
This page contains an outline of procedures that you may need to perform as instructed by developers. Please, pay attention to the steps and record the values and messages as instructed. PROCEDURE B1 On the tablet: Make sure you are logged out of the Interviewer application. Reboot the tablet. Start the Interviewer App. Log in as interviewer, Send to the person providing assistance (see bullets 3, 4, and 6 here): the interviewer trace logs, all tablet information, and all technical information.
March 30, 2023Deployment with Docker
You can install and run Survey Solutions Headquarters using our official Docker image. Prerequisite Survey Solutions container can be executed on any hosting system that is capable of running linux/amd64 containers. Please refer to docker documentation page on how to install Docker for Your operating system - https://docs.docker.com/get-docker Survey Solutions has linux based container image and cannot be run in Windows Containers. To run Survey Solutions in Docker on Windows you will need WSL2
January 24, 2023Server Installation
Installation has following steps: Installing PostgreSQL Installing SurveySolutions Post installation configuration Installing PostgreSQL Make sure that you have an installed and running instance of PostgreSQL before running SurveySolutions.exe You can download PostgreSQL from here and run the setup. Pick the latest stable version (note: Survey Solutions will not work with PostgreSQL prior to version 10.0). During the process you’ll set the password for the database superuser: 📷 PostgreSQL password and the port, on which the PostgreSQL server will be running:
February 5, 2022Support tool
Survey Solutions comes with a built-in support tool that can be used in special situations: where an action needs to be taken programmatically; where an action may not be taken through the web interface. The support tool is being called via a command line (while being in the directory where Survey Solutions is installed), we type: WB.UI.Headquarters.exe manage ... followed by one of the following commands: version users workspaces migration These commands and their subcommands and options are described below.
November 25, 2021PDS password reset
How can I reset a password for a PDS should I forget it? If you forget your password for the demo server, you can reset it, by right-clicking the server name, and selecting the Request password reset menu item in the self-service portal. The new password will be automatically generated and sent to your email. The older password will no longer be valid. How do I know that a new password has been sent to me?
August 26, 2021Personal Demo Server
Survey Solutions users may familiarize themselves with the Headquarters/Admin functionality using a personal demo server (PDS). Personal demo servers are managed through the self-service portal. You start by submitting a corresponding request. Before you proceed, make sure you understand the purpose and limitations of the PDS: Every Survey Solutions user may request one PDS. There are no forms to fill and the server becomes available shortly after the request is submitted.
July 19, 2021Report: Survey Statistics
Survey Statistics report is accessible to supervisors and headquarter users, observers, and administrators. The report presents basic statistics calculated on survey data currently on the server and eliminates (in some cases) the need to export the data for calculation of these statistics. The report is always built within a single survey and is built for one of the questions in that survey. The report may be presented in one of the two modes: tabulation or summary statistics.
January 15, 2020Detailed action log
The detailed action log allows the headquarters users view important actions undertaken by the interviewers on the tablets, such as application start and login activities, starting or discarding an interview, synchronization attempts, and other actions undertaken in the last 7 days. The actions log is updated with any synchronization of the tablet. (But if the tablet does not synchronize, there is no way for the HQ personnel to know what actions were undertaken, since this information won’t be sent).
June 8, 2018Downloadable Report on Interviewers
This report is accessible in CSV, TSV, or Excel formats from the list of the interviewers screen and contains important information about the equipment being used by the interviewer and various statistics about the interviewer accounts, equipment status, etc. Thematically the indicators reported here are placed in the following groups: Indicator naming Group i_* indicators related to the interviewer account these indicators represent static or accumulated information about the interviewer account t_* indicators related to the tablet device;
December 6, 2017Reports Tab: Track the Overall Progress of the Survey
Reports provide headquarters with a summary of the status of fieldwork—of progress by questionnaire, by team, by status duration, by devices/interviewers, by geography, by quantity, by speed, or on detailed survey statistics. All the reports under this tab can be exported in XLSX, TAB, and CSV formats. To export, navigate to the bottom right of the report, and click on the desired download format. By questionnaire template The Surveys and Statuses report summarizes the progress of each survey that headquarters is overseeing (i.
June 29, 2016Menu Map
This article describes the structure of the main menu and dialogs structure of the Survey Solutions Data Server. The items in curly brackets { } are links and buttons present in the dialogs. The rest are items in the main or context menus. [workspace] Reports Surveys and Statuses Teams and Statuses Status Duration Devices/Interviewers Map Report Cumulative Interview Chart Quantity Speed Survey Statistics Interviews {Map dashboard} Open Show Status History Open responsible’s profile Open assignment Assign Approve Reject Change to CAPI Change to CAWI Unapprove Delete Survey Setup Questionnaires {Import questionnaire} Questionnaire details PDF preview New assignment Upload assignments Upgrade assignments Web interview setup Download web links Send invitations Clone questionnaire Delete questionnaire Export questionnaire Assignments Assignment details Maps Maps Update user-to-map linking User maps Data Export Administration Workspaces Open Edit Settings Email providers Device logs Audit log Tablet information packages Interview packages Disable Delete Users Create Batch upload Audit log Diagnostics Help [account] Manage account Profile Change password Two factor authentication Setup authenticator Reset authenticator Logoff Please note:
May 13, 2021Map files
In Survey Solutions all maps are first uploaded to the server, then distributed to the interviewers based on assignments of maps. This functionality is accessible for the users in roles headquarters and administrator only. The Map files page is the page where the maps are managed at the Survey Solutions server (Headquarters). It can be accessed by The Maps dialog is using two icons to denote types of the uploaded maps:
December 14, 2022Shapefile maps
Survey Solutions Interviewer App displays maps for two purposes: The dashboard depicts the assignments and interviews on the map by placing markers that correspond to the coordinates of an identifying question. Geography questions (single- and multiple points, polyline and polygon) allow capturing geographical information by marking it on the map layer, typically a satellite or aero-photography. Survey Solutions has been employing this functionality for several years already using the ESRI ArcGIS Android SDK components.
June 14, 2022Digital Map Formats
Survey Solutions offline maps may be prepared in any of the following formats: FORMAT EXTENSION TYPE LINKS ESRI tile package.*.tpk raster USDA Tutorial on creation of TPK tile packages.ESRI documentation Create Map Tile Package ESRI mobile map package. *.mmpk rasterESRI tutorial on creating MMPK mobile map packages. GeoTIFF*.tiff rasterOGC GeoTIFF standardExample file and description (external links). Shapefile**.shp*.shx*.dbf vector QGIS tutorial on creation of shapefiles. ESRI Shapefile Technical Description *) Shapefiles cannot be uploaded to the headquarters and must be distributed manually to the interviewers' tablets.
April 18, 2021Survey Solutions Server Administrator
Every Survey Solutions server has an administrator. This is the first user account created after Survey Solutions is installed, typically by the same person who performed the installation. Administrator is a privileged account and can do important actions which may result in damage to data. Assign a responsible and informed person as an administrator! We recommend that the administrator has attended a comprehensive Survey Solutions training. An administrator can do (almost) everything an HQ user can do plus some exclusive actions:
May 17, 2023Workspaces
Workspaces allow partitioning of a single server into multiple compartments that have limited impact on each other. The following are the rules guiding the use and functioning of the workspaces: An administrator has access to all workspaces. A user with an HQ and observer accounts may belong to one, some, or all workspaces, as designated by the administrator. Each interviewer and supervisor account may log in to a single workspace.
May 10, 2022Token-based authentication
Survey Solutions supports two methods of authentication for API queries: Basic (a combination of the login and password) and Bearer (using a system-generated token) also known as JSON Web Token (JWT). Activation of the token-based authentication for the server By default token-based authentication is switched off. To activate it, the server configuration file must be modified to include the following section: [JwtBearer] Enabled=true SecretKey=[..............] For the SecretKey specify any alphanumeric key of at least 16 digits/characters long.
February 9, 2022CAPTCHA
A brute-force attack (aka BF-attack) is an attack on the system by probing of all possible combinations of inputs to the login forms (user names, passwords, and any other information there). If a system is able to tell humans from computers apart, it can defend itself from mechanical guesses. A CAPTCHA is a challenge that humans can solve easily, while computers have difficulties with. Thus a CAPTCHA serves as an effective, (though not completely bullet-proof) mechanism for protecting a system from brute-force attacks.
June 29, 2021Autolock
To protect the safety of the data and prevent disruptions to the operations due to hacker attacks, the system responds to attempts to guess a user’s password. In the normal state, the user needs to enter just the login name and password to access the system. If, however, she makes multiple attempts to log in with an incorrect password, the system raises to the elevated state. To log in in the elevated state the user needs to supply her login name, password, and additionally solve a CAPTCHA challenge.
June 23, 2021Batch User Upload
Up to 10,000 user accounts can be created from a single tab-delimited file, which must include the login, password, and role of the user, and may include additional attributes, like email or phone. Batch creation of user accounts comes handy when: the same accounts need to be replicated on a different server; migrating from a different CAPI system with established accounts; the survey is so huge that manual creation of accounts via a web interface would take a significant amount of time.
April 29, 2021Survey Solutions Account Types
Survey Solutions Data Server provides the following account types: administrator - manages the server, creates workspaces, user accounts. headquarters - starts surveys, creates assignments, conducts top-level quality review of interviews, exports data supervisor - manages teams if interviewers, distributes work between interviewers, quality check of interviews; interviewer - conducts interviews; observer - observes operations on the server; API user - user account for user-written extensions accessing the server. The Survey Solutions Designer site account may not be used to log in to the data server.
March 30, 2021Adding Users to Workspaces
Some users (Headquarters, API users) may be granted access to more than 1 workspace. This access is granted by the server administrator at the Server Administration –> User Management page. To give access to a certain workspace, the administrator selects the user account(s) from the list of all user accounts on the server, then selects Add to Workspaces. In the dialog window that appear, administrator should select the names of the workspaces that the user should be granted access to, and confirm the changes.
March 1, 2021Creating User Accounts
The Teams and Roles menu provides tools for managing the human resources responsible for data collection: The following accounts may be created by the users in the role Headquarters or Administrator: interviewer and supervisor accounts. The following accounts may be created by the users in the role Administrator only: headquarters, observers, and API accounts. Note: The Teams and Roles menu also provides access to the batch user upload feature, where up to 10,000 user accounts can be created from a single tab-delimited file.
July 28, 2020Deleting accounts
Deleting accounts An account that is created in Survey Solutions can not be deleted. Ever. This is because the account is mentioned in the history of the events that were originated by that user (such as created or completed an interview). Yet an account can be archived, which is the closest thing to deleting it. This action is available to an administrator only, which can (1) select the interviewer account to be archived and (2) click the Archive button to perform the action:
July 28, 2020Dynamic filters for interviews
Dynamic filters are used to filter responses in the interviews list and in the map report. The filters can be formulated based on the variables belonging to the cover page and/or exposed variables. Rules Rules utilize comparative operators, that are logical operators for comparing the value to a constant. Which operators are available depends on the type of the question/variable: For categorical single-select: equals, not equals. For numeric: =, <>, <, <=, >, >=.
May 11, 2021Headquarters user: Browsing the Completed Interview
Step 1 Log in to your server using a headquarters account. If you are testing Survey Solutions, log in to the demo server Step 2 Go to the Interviews tab Step 3 From the filter on the left side of the screen, select Approved By Supervisor Step 4 Click on the interview key for the survey case that you would like to browse. Now you can see all the answers given by the respondents—the answers marked in red are invalid according to the validation rules.
July 19, 2016Interview Tab: How to Find, Review, and Delete Survey Cases
The Interview tab is designed for taking action. Under the Interview tab, headquarters may search for survey cases, reallocate them to different teams, review them for quality assurance, and delete them to fix problems. The interview tab consists of the following tools: Database of survey cases. The rows are survey case entries. The columns capture details about survey cases, such as the respondent’s address, interview status, and an indicator that the interviewer has or has not received the survey case.
June 30, 2016Survey Workflow
Workflow Demonstration Check out the video below (starting from 0:30) to learn about the survey workflow in Survey Solutions. Workflow Description Headquarters, designated by the PC at the top of the figure, determines the subjects that need to be interviewed (households, firms, geographic area, etc.) and their assignments across team supervisors. Assignments can include one or more interview cases. Team supervisors, denoted by the laptops in the middle, first receive these assignments and then allocate them to the members of their team.
June 29, 2016Paradata file format
Every survey collected in Survey Solutions is supplemented with a paradata file. No actions are needed from the questionnaire designers or headquarters team to collect it, it is produced automatically by the Survey Solutions software. The paradata files describe the process of data collection. They explain how the data was entered, detailing all edits, who and when undertaken them. These files may be large and most conveniently processed using specialized statistical packages, rather than general purpose tools.
August 23, 2022Audio Audit Files
Survey Solutions has a feature of audio audit: a capability of recording an interview and provide the recording for the audit of the interviewing process. The recording covers all the duration of the interview from the moment it starts to completion, except the time when: the tablet is off; the user switches to a different app; the interview is not active (Interviewer has switched to a different interview or switched to the dashboard); the audio recording is done as an answer to an audio question; when the interview is completed over the web (CAWI mode).
February 14, 2022How does Survey Solutions identify records and establish connections between data?
Survey Solutions works with various surveys done in different conditions, so trying to come up with one naming scheme that would be equally suitable for all applications is a challenging task. A particular survey may come up with a numbering like 2 digits of the province code, followed by 3 digits of the district code, followed by the household id of 4 digits. Yet it is not a good identifier in the case where several surveys are conducted on the same server, or there may be repetitive visits, and other twists.
October 5, 2020Organization of meta-data storage in the exported data
Survey Solutions export file is a zip-archive with multiple data files corresponding to various levels of data and system-generated accompanying data reflecting the comments, errors, statuses and other technical information about interviews and assignments. When the corresponding setting is activated in the export interface, the data is accompanied with the meta-data reflecting the structure of the questionnaire. The meta-data is saved to the subfolder Questionnaire of the export archive. The questionnaire subfolder contains the following information:
September 17, 2020Interview diagnostics file
interview__diagnostics file is a special service file, automatically produced with every data export, that contains useful information for assessing the quality of interviews: number of invalid entities (invalid answers and errors in static texts), number of questions with comments, duration of the interview etc. For a description of available fields and their types, refer to this article. This is especially useful for user-written monitoring systems that work alongside Survey Solutions and continually monitor the quality of incoming data by periodically exporting the data and building customized reports.
October 1, 2019System generated files
Every archive of data exported from the Survey Solutions Headquarters contains among the user data the following system-generated data files: assignment__actions interview__actions interview__comments interview__diagnostics interview__errors The above data files are saved in the same data format as the main survey data, for example, if the main data is requested in Stata format, the system-generated data files will also be exported in Stata format. The data files are also accompanied by an automatically generated text file named export__readme.
October 1, 2019Export to cloud storage
Binary data files, such as pictures and audio recordings are often large and can be time-consuming to download. One can now opt for pushing the data to own cloud storage, rather than downloading directly. The following cloud storage repositories are supported: DropBox; Google Drive; OneDrive. The direct download of binary data in the form of a single large zip-archive remains available. To push the data to the cloud storage, select the corresponding option in the download dialog, then authenticate yourself with the corresponding cloud storage provider:
June 5, 2019Merging files of different data levels
Survey Solutions produces export data files separately for each data level. This can be for example households, persons, plots, crops, etc. The process is completely automatic and not configurable by the user. If you need to combine information from different data levels (for example bring household characteristics to the personal level) you can utilize a statistical package to post-process your data. This is a basic operation supported by most packages, such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, R and others, though the exact terms may differ by package.
January 7, 2019Export of calculated variables
Calculated variables are commonly used in CAPI questionnaires to implement complex checks or indicate to the interviewer some derived information. For example, one may create a variable that calculates the number of children in the household, numChildren = Persons.Count(person => person.age < 18) and use this variable in subsequent questions to check if the number of children in a household exceeds a specific threshold. Starting with version 5.24 of Survey Solutions these variables will be automatically included in the export data.
September 28, 2018Missing values
Survey Solutions recognizes two situations of missingness: the value is missing because the logic of the questionnaire is disabling (skipping) this question. There is nothing that the interviewer can do to enter a value in such a field and in some cases even to see the question and its options. the value is missing despite the question is enabled (not skipped). This could be because of any of the following: interviewer hasn’t reached this point in the interview; interviewer missed the question, didn’t ask it and hence no answer was recorded; none of the options was suitable to accommodate the respondent’s answer and hence the interviewer didn’t record the answer; other similar situations.
June 13, 2017Upgrading assignments
Survey Solutions assignments play a critical role in the survey process because they regulate who is supposed to deliver the incoming data (interviews). Each assignment is referring to a particular questionnaire. It is best to not modify the questionnaire during the survey. Some of the undesirable effects of this are: the survey becomes split between several databases, each has to be downloaded separately from Survey Slutions and appended later using external tools; the data may no longer be comparable (e.
December 12, 2018Protecting pre-loaded answers
Starting with v18.06 Survey Solutions allows protecting values of trigger questions that have been preloaded from being subsequently modified by the interviewer. The protection applies to reduction, but permits extension. This is commonly needed in the panel surveys, where, for example, the names in the list of household members that are preloaded should not be eliminated by the interviewer, but new household members may be added if needed. The protection applies to questions that may perform the role of triggers: numeric, text list, and multiple-select categorical (in regular or Y/N-mode).
June 6, 2018Errors in user-supplied files for preloading
Survey Solutions allows preloading assignments with data, including answers to questions inside rosters and nested rosters. It is the user’s responsibility to supply valid input files for this process. The user-supplied files will be validated to match the questionnaire template that is being preloaded. Survey Solutions can detect a number of inconsistencies and common problems and will indicate them during preloading. Each detected error is having a code listed in the table below.
March 9, 2018Survey Setup Tab: Import, Copy, and Delete Questionnaire Templates, and Create Assignments
The survey setup tab lets you do several things: Questionnaires Import template. Import questionnaires from the Designer site to the headquarters software. Create assignments: Headquarters provides two ways of creating assignments for a given questionnaire: one at a time, or in a many at a time (batch). Clone questionnaire template: Copy the questionnaire templates previously imported to the server. This feature is only available to the administrator. Delete questionnaire. This feature is only available to the administrator.
June 29, 2017Creating Assignments One at Time
Step 1 Log in to your server using the headquarters username and password Note that each institution using Survey Solutions will utilize their own server. Consequently, your username can differ from the one depicted above. Step 2 Select the Survey Setup tab, and click on Questionnaires. Step 3 Create the new assignment for your questionnaire. Click on the questionnaire template you want to create a new assignment for, and then click on New Assignments from the pop-up menu.
June 29, 2017Numbering in subordinate rosters during preloading
It is important to make sure that during preloading of multiple files the subordinate records are correctly identified. The numbering depends on the kind of trigger used for determining the size of the roster: fixed: the Id variable in the subordinate file should contain the code of the item specified in the Designer. multiple choice: the subordinate file should contain the codes of items as specified during setting up the multiple choice question in the Designer.
February 23, 2017Uploading Many Assignments at a time
For many surveys, creating assignments one by one will be a tedious and time intensive task. To help speed up your work, Survey Solutions allows you to batch upload many assignments at once using a tab delimited. Follow the steps below to perform a batch upload of assignments: Step 1 Create a tab-delimited file with the identifying information for your assignments Before performing an interview, data collection teams must know the name (e.
June 27, 2016Configuring Amazon SES as an email service provider
Amazon provides a number of services (free and paid) that may be of interest to the application developer. Here we are specifically interested in utilizing the Simple Email Service (SES) from within Survey Solutions for mass email sending. Usage of this service may cost you money. Make sure you understand all charges, limits and policies before utilizing this service. Amazon Simple Email Service is available at the following address: https://aws.amazon.com/ses
May 24, 2021Webpage Templates
Survey Solutions presents several web pages to the respondents to the web surveys (CAWI). These pages may need to be customized at the web interview setup page: Menu → Survey Setup → Questionnaires → YourQuestionnaire → Web interview setup. Changes made to these templates take immediate effect: any new page of the corresponding type will be shown using the most recently saved template. Web page Description Welcome page This page is shown to the respondent opening the link to a web interview.
November 26, 2020Email Templates
Survey Solutions can send email notifications to the respondents to the web surveys (CAWI). These notifications can be configured at the web interview setup page: Menu → Survey Setup → Questionnaires → YourQuestionnaire → Web interview setup. Survey Solutions server automatically determines, which notifications need to be sent out to the respondents. Every hour the notifications of the type marked with ^ in the table below are sent out, if a bulk email service provider has been set up.
November 26, 2020Web Interviewing
In addition to CAPI surveys on Android tablets, Survey Solutions provides two distinct possibilities: Interviewing: Interviewers conduct interviews using the web interface (without a tablet); Self-enumeration: Respondents fill out interviews in the browser. The difference is essential: In the first case the person filling out the interview is a known member of the team, has an account created in the system, assigned to a team of a certain supervisor and so on.
October 30, 2020Configuring Sendgrid as an email service provider
SendGrid is a bulk email service provider that can be used in Survey Solutions for delivering invitations for CAWI surveys as an alternative to Amazon SES: https://sendgrid.com/ Usage of this service may cost you money. Make sure you understand all charges, limits and policies before utilizing this service. SendGrid reqires you to have a domain and confirm yourself as a domain owner. The sending address must belong to this domain. For example, if you want to send emails from name@site.
March 31, 2019Bulk email service providers
Bulk email service providers solve the task of sending out a massive ammount of emails. Survey Solutions may utilize such a service provider to deliver email invitations for CAWI surveys to the respondents. At the moment the following providers are supported: Amazon SES; SendGrid. You don’t have to use the above services to conduct a CAWI survey, but in that case (just as it was in versions prior to 19.04) it will be your responsibility to deliver the links for the interviews to individual respondents.
March 31, 2019Customize web interview messages
Web interviews conducted with Survey Solutions contain reasonable default messages suitable for many surveys. But if the default messages are not suitable for a certain purpose, they can be customized in the web survey setup dialog at the Survey Solutions Headquarters: For every parameter select if you wish to display a built-in default message, or a custom one, and if so, provide your custom (formatted) text of such a message. You can use the formatting toolbar provided in the editor to adjust the font color and font attributes, include numbered and bullet lists, and include hyperlinks.
April 2, 2018API: R-package
Introduction to the Survey Solutions API R-package Why this package The World Bank’s Computer Assisted Survey System (CASS) Survey Solutions is a powerful tool for high quality data collection and used in many statistical offices around the world. Besides the standard GUI, it also comes with a powerful REST API. For details see https://docs.mysurvey.solutions/ To further facilitate its integration in a fully automated workflow we have developed this R package, which covers almost all of the available API calls.
May 10, 2023Survey Solutions API
Survey Solutions includes a powerful and flexible API which allows automating some tasks and allows our users to build larger systems, which may compliment Survey Solutions to achieve larger goals. Some examples of use could be: schedule periodic export of collected data an external dashboard or monitoring and reporting system, which updates some indicators every night and publishes them to a website, or an external checking and validation system which verifies collected data against some external sources of information and rejects automatically the incorrect interviews, or an integrated system, which utilizes Survey Solutions for data collections tasks and a statistical package for continuous analysis, facility management, inventory and price monitoring systems, etc, etc.
May 1, 2022API: .NET package
Introduction to the Survey Solutions .NET API Client package There is a client library aviable to be used in .NET runtime to execute API methods of Survey Solutions software. In order to get started install dotnet SDK. After done that you will be able to use included in SDK CLI to create a new project, execute the following command: dotnet new console This will create a sample console application. To add Survey solutions client library execute following command:
March 5, 2021API interactive description
The following page contains an interactive description of the Survey Solutions API for the current release: https://demo.mysurvey.solutions/apidocs If your server’s version is different, check its API at: https://SERVERNAME.mysurvey.solutions/apidocs
January 23, 2021API: Powershell Module
SSAW PowerShell module contains cmdlets wrapping Survey Solutions API to abstract away from some of the HTTP details. As PowerShell command-line shell is already present and all Windows machines, users can start automating their interaction with Survey Solutions application without any additional software development. PowerShell can be installed on Mac and Linux computers as well, but you may prefer to use the Python client insted. The module is still work-in-progress so not all API methods are implemented or documented yet.
January 22, 2021