Export the tested survey as a questionnaire or Dimensions script

Every test run teaches SurveyTester something about the survey: its pages, the questions on them, the answer options and grid rows, their texts in every language, the rules the survey enforces and the routes the respondents take. The download center on the Pages & Routing page writes that knowledge back out as a document a person can read or a script a survey system can load. The first two exports are a Word questionnaire and a Dimensions script for UNICOM Intelligence / IBM SPSS Data Collection.

What the export is about

A survey that only exists as a live link is hard to hand over. The questionnaire document that was written before scripting is usually out of date by the time the survey goes live, and nobody wants to copy hundreds of questions and answer lists out of a browser by hand. The download center creates these documents from the survey as it actually runs:

• a Word questionnaire that reads like a classic paper questionnaire - one question after the other with its answer options, grids as tables, write-in boxes for open questions - for reviews, sign-offs, translators and clients;
• a Dimensions script with the metadata and routing sections that UNICOM Intelligence Professional and Author accept, for re-scripting a survey on that platform or for comparing a scripted survey with the one that went live.

Both exports are built from what testing detected. They are not related to a questionnaire document you may have uploaded on the Questionnaire tab; they mirror the live survey.

Why this is hard without SurveyTester

• The live survey is the only truth. Changes made during scripting rarely find their way back into the questionnaire document. A document written from the live survey cannot be out of date.
• Texts exist per language. A multilingual survey has one text per language for every question and answer; collecting them means clicking through every language.
• Rules and routing are invisible on the page. Which options are exclusive, how many answers are allowed, which page follows which answer - a reader of the survey never sees it, a tester only after many runs.
• Scripting from a document is slow. A scripter who moves a survey to Dimensions types every question, category and route again.

SurveyTester already knows all of this from the test runs and writes it down in one click.

How it works

Open Pages & Routing and click the download icon next to the reload button.

The download center opens with one tile per export. Each tile has its own options and its own Create and download button; the dialog stays open, so you can create several files in a row.

Options

Option	What it does
Include programmer's notes	Adds, under every question, what SurveyTester detected: variable name, question type and widget, how many answers may be selected, exclusive and "other, please specify" options, text and number limits, whether the answer order rotates, and the routing observed after the page. In the Dimensions script these notes become comments; the rules themselves become syntax.
Include hidden pages	Pages you marked as Hidden in the Pages table (test-only pages such as a login or a quota page) are left out by default. Switch this on to include them; they are marked in the document.
Survey languages	One file per selected language. With one language you get a single file; with several, a zip file that holds one file per language. The language currently chosen as overlay is preselected; without an overlay every language is.
Document captions (Word only)	The fixed texts of the document - "Programmer's note", "Hidden page", the cover page - in English, German or French. Your own interface language is preselected.

The Word questionnaire

The document starts with a cover page: project, language, survey system, survey link, when and by whom it was created and which options were used. Then the pages follow in the order of the Pages table, each with its questions:

• single and multiple choice questions as lists with a circle or a box per option; "other" options get a write-in line;
• grids as tables with the items in rows and the scale in columns - one table per scale when the rows use different scales, landscape when a scale is wide;
• forms as rows with a write-in line each, open questions as boxes, numbers and dates with their format;
• extra boxes such as Don't know under the question they belong to.

With programmer's notes the routing reads like an instruction for the scripter, for example If Entrance = Side skip to q8 or Otherwise skip to Thanks. These lines come from the routes the test runs actually took: an answer counts as the reason for a route when nearly all runs with that answer took it and hardly any run with that answer went elsewhere. A page that simply continues with the next page gets no routing line.

Texts that have no translation in the selected language are shown in grey italics with the element name, so a missing translation is visible instead of silently filled with another language.

The Dimensions script

The script is the text form of an .mdd: a Metadata(...) section in mrScriptMetadata and a Routing(Web) section in mrScriptBasic. Open UNICOM Intelligence Professional or Author, create a new document and paste the sections into the Metadata and Routing views - or load the file as the document's script.

Metadata(en-US, Question, Label)
    Entrance "Which entrance did you use?" categorical [1..1] { Main "Main", Side "Side" };
    Rating "How do you rate ..." loop { Staff "Staff", Shop "Shop" } fields
    (
        Rating "" categorical [1..1] { Good "Good", Fair "Fair", Poor "Poor" };
    ) expand grid;
    Comments "Anything else?" text;
    P2 "" page(Entrance, Rating, Comments);
End Metadata

Routing(Web)
Lbl_P2:
    P2.Ask()
    If Entrance.ContainsAny({Side}) Then Goto Lbl_P8
End Routing

• Question and category names come from the survey; characters that are not allowed in a Dimensions name are replaced, names that collide get a number, and the original text stays in the label.
• Single and multiple choice become categorical [1..1] and [1..], with other and exclusive where detected and ran where the answer order rotates. Grids become loops with expand grid, forms become block fields, open questions text, numbers long or double with their range, dates date.
• Every survey page becomes a page(...) item; the routing asks the pages in order and writes the observed skips as If ... Then Goto lines.
• A metadata script carries one language, so you get one file per selected language.

Working with a result filter

An active result filter applies to the export: the document shows the survey as the filtered test runs saw it. Only the pages those runs visited are included, the texts are the ones that were current at the time of those runs, and the routing counts only those runs. This is how you export the German version as tested in September, or the questionnaire of one market only. The cover page names the filter and says how many pages were left out.

Step by step

1. Open the project and go to Pages & Routing.
2. Set a result filter if the export should cover a subset of the test runs, for example one milestone or one market.
3. Click the download icon next to the reload button.
4. In the tile you need, tick Include programmer's notes for a scripter's version or leave it unticked for a clean questionnaire, and decide about hidden pages.
5. Select the survey languages, and for the Word document the caption language.
6. Click Create and download. The status line shows the progress; the file or zip lands in your browser's download folder.