Survey Solutions Survey
Solutions Documentation and knowledge base

Version 18.04

April 2, 2018

The April 2018 release ushers in numerous improvements to each component of the Survey Solutions. We have also changed our version numbering notation and from now on will use the YY.MM notation for new versions, such as 18.04 for the April 2018 release. Some of the features below are new functionality that are described in more details in the corresponding linked articles.

Designer

  • Validation warnings, read the article;
  • Special values for numeric questions, read the article;
  • Capturing signatures, (as requested by Mr. Eugene Ehlers, AHRI) read the article;
  • Comments in Designer, read the article;
  • Export questionnaires as HTML (as requested by Mr. Edwin St. Catherine, CSO St. Lucia);
  • Reload questionnaire in Web Tester: When the reload button is pressed, the web tester will behave just like the tablet Tester application: the questionnaire will be updated to reflect recent changes, while the data previously entered will be preserved and all condtions re-evaluated.
  • Prevent circular references in enabling and filter conditions, read the article. 

Headquarters

  • Compact presentation of answered categorical questions in interview details view with only selected answers shown in single- and multi-select categorical questions;
  • Old interview details page retained in several previous versions to facilitate transition to the new design is now deprecated;
  • Customize web interview messages, (as requested by Mr. Michael Rahija, FAO) read the article;
  • Export binary data to user-designated cloud data storage, read the article.

Supervisor

  • Map report is now available for supervisors, (as requested by Mr. Phil Bright, SPC and other users) covering interviews in their responsibility (report for all interviews remains available to the Headquarters users).
  • Speed report uses active interview time: active interview time is defined as time when the tablet screen is on and an interview is open in the Survey Solutions Interviewer application. This is more relevant for interview duration estimation, over the approach in earlier versions, which based the reports on simple difference between the timestamps at start and finish of the interviews.

Interviewer

  • Search on the dashboard (as suggested by Mr. Luqmaan Omar, StatsSA) allows locating the interviews across the various tabs of the Interviewer application.

Advanced features and troubleshooting tools

  • Automatic update of the Interviewer application is now default mode on all Survey Solutions servers. The updates are performed automatically by determining only the minimal information that is necessary to be send and the size of the files is typically smaller than 200kb, which makes it possible to receive the critical update for interviewers working even in the most difficult connectivity modes; automatic updates can be disabled by server administrators, though this is not desirable in typical scenarios.
  • Export questionnaires from the Headquarters for the Survey Solutions technical support team in case the original questionnaire has been modified or deleted in the Designer.
  • Capture log of interviews created and deleted on the tablet: the Interviewer application captures what happens to each interview, including those that are created and deleted on the tablet before syncing. In this way, the Headquarters and technical support teams can know what happened on the tablet, and thereby better troubleshoot interview reports of missing interviews.
  • New API endpoints for users utilizing API automation: posting comments to interviews and getting the interview statistics (number of questions answered, unanswered, flagged, valid, invalid, with comments, etc). See the API documentation.