You may often wish to link certain actions to specific events. For example, in a customer satisfaction survey, customers can report negative experiences. Now, you wish to automatically e-mail the customer’s report to your customer center. In another survey a respondent may request additional information material. In this case it would be helpful if the respondent’s address data (as far as they have been voluntarily submitted) were directly transferred to your sales department or if the submission of the corresponding information material were triggered automatically. Using triggers you can (if applicable) enter additional information on the respondent into the survey at runtime and make it available to the respondent as context information, or make the route through the questionnaire dependent on the value of this information.
You can use triggers to perform these tasks by selecting and configuring the appropriate actions and associating them with specific variable values within the questionnaire.
Triggers in detail
The following table provides an overview of the different trigger types.
Trigger | Properties | Project type | Page type |
|---|---|---|---|
Mail trigger | Upon occurrence of the event to be defined, an e-mail with predefined or dynamically generated content will be sent to an e-mail address that was either defined in advance or collected during the survey. | all | all |
Page trigger | Upon occurrence of the event to be defined, the respondent will be directed to a certain page of the survey. | all | all |
Logout trigger | Upon occurrence of the event to be defined, the respondent will be directed to the final page. | all | all |
Sample trigger | Upon occurrence of the event to be defined, the respondent will be registered in a sample of the target survey and will be invited via e-mail. The sample trigger can be set up and executed in all quantitative survey types (AN, PE, PA, MD, ES, MSF). For target survey, you can use all survey types with participant administration, | all | all |
Reinvitation trigger | The trigger reinvites the participant to take part in the same survey. This feature can be used if, for example, the respondent does not want to fill in the survey now but agrees to be reminded of it via e-mail. | PE, PA, MD, ES, MSF | Final pages, system final pages |
Variable split trigger | The trigger reads cookies and Get parameters, respectively, and writes them into user-defined variables. It is able to use a split attribute to separate cookies and passed parameters into single variables. | all | all |
Recoding trigger | This trigger can be used to recode survey variables. The recoded values can, for example, be transferred from other variables or calculated on the basis of the entries made by participants | all | all |
Random trigger | This trigger can be used to generate a random number from a specified interval. | all | all |
List trigger | The list trigger allows you to transfer the contents of a list into userdefined variables. The contents of the user-defined variables can in turn be displayed in the questionnaire via wildcards. | all | all |
Prequalification trigger | This type of trigger imports a participant as a panel-user | ||
Portal-action trigger | Creates action in portal action board. |
Basic notes on triggers
You can specify whether to execute the trigger more than once in a survey session. To do so, tick the checkbox labeled “Execute this trigger multiple times in one survey session” in the trigger editor.
You are able to choose whether triggers will be executed or disabled in the preview. For example, it would make sense to disable the random trigger, in order to facilitate repeated testing under constant conditions. This function is activated by ticking the checkbox labeled “Also execute trigger in preview mode” in the trigger editor. By default this function is not activated.
In principle, triggers can be created on all survey page types. But some trigger types are destined for use on specific page types, as e.g. final pages.
On each page, you can create as many triggers as required. Please mind, though, that trigger actions require a lot of server resources, i.e. they affect the performance of the questionnaire. Therefore, it is recommended to use not more than 50 triggers per page.
You can use Drag&Drop to change the sequence of triggers on a page, which may be relevant for the order of execution.
Triggers are associated with a variable on the page. If the page does not contain any variable, use a dummy variable: Create a question of the type “911 - User-defined” to register a variable with the system. Write the variable onto the form as a hidden variable: “<input type=hidden name=V_NAME_AUS_911 value=1>”. This will transfer a fixed value to the trigger.
When a page is sent, the EFS routing engine goes through various tasks: It reviews plausibility checks, saves the data, searches for the next page and displays it. The execution position determines the point in the process at which the trigger is executed. The following execution positions are possible and only those which make sense for the current trigger type are available for selection in the trigger editor.
Select “Execution position = Directly”, if you want the trigger to be executed first, before the page on which the trigger is defined will be output. Do not use this setting on the first page of a survey.
If you select “Execution position = After submitting page, before filter”, the trigger will be executed after the page has been submitted, but before a filter that immediately follows it. Select this option if you want to use the result returned by the trigger for filtering (for example, if the trigger result fulfills a user-defined variable being used as a filter). This execution position is not available on final pages, independent of the trigger type. For page trigger, logout trigger and reinvitation trigger, it is disabled completely.
If you select “Execution position = After submitting page, after filter”, the trigger will be executed after the page has been submitted. You can use this option if the trigger returns a result that you only want to use after the filter has been applied, i.e. the next page has been determined. For example, it is imaginable that you want to overwrite a user-defined variable, but only after the trigger has been executed.
You can create triggers with the execution position “Directly” right on the first questionnaire page. The conditions of such a trigger can contain participant variables, URL parameters and user-defined variables. Project variables cannot be used in such a trigger because they will not be available until after the first page has been sent, i.e. on the second questionnaire page.
Some trigger types create contents to be saved in the survey result data, e.g. calculating formulas or saving parameters. For this purpose, user-defined variables.
The runtime check, originally introduced for LUA filters, notes when a trigger cannot be executed, e.g. because an e-mail cannot be dispatched due to a broken if condition.
Only for installations with EFS SMS Extension: It is not possible to dispatch SMS via triggers.
You will usually be on the safe side if you select the “Execution position = After submitting page, before filter” option!
Make sure you adjust the type of the user-defined variable (Labels and data type link) if you do not want to save integers to the variable. If necessary, change the type to Text or Decimal.
Condition editor
In the condition editor, you specify for which event the trigger will be activated / executed.
Basic steps
The basic steps to creating a trigger are identical for all trigger types:
Create a questionnaire page.
Create a question of the type of your choice.
Select the desired trigger type.
Specify the execution position.
Select the variable (question) with which you want to associate the trigger.
Specify the answer value at which the trigger is to be activated.
Specify the trigger’s detail properties (select a mail template, etc.)
Creating a Trigger
In many questionnaires it is considered polite to have a final open-ended question at the end of the questionnaire and ask the respondent if they have anything else to say. Especially if you design a survey in the form of a conversation, it is to be expected that not all the thoughts the respondent has developed while answering the questionnaire will be revealed with the help of closed-ended questions. In order to give the respondent the opportunity to round off the conversation from their point of view, they are allowed to enter information. The survey manager has this sent to himself directly in order to have the option of reacting directly to events in the field.
Below, a mail trigger for a personalized survey is created to trigger the dispatch of such a participant comment to the survey manager.
Creating a Mail Trigger
In the first step, you create the trigger:
In the Questionnaire editor, open the page containing the open-ended question.
Click on the Triggers menu
Click on the + Trigger button.
Enter the title of the new trigger.
Select the “Mail trigger” trigger type.
Confirm with Create.
The edit dialog for the new trigger opens.
Making Basic Settings
On the first tab, settings must be made which are required for all trigger types.
Enter a description.
In the “Execution position” field, select the “After submitting page, after filter” option.
If you only wish to send the mail when the respondent has actually made a comment, then you must define corresponding conditions:
Click on the Edit link in the “Condition” field.
Enter the desired definition in the condition editor. In this example the mail should only be sent out if the text field with the variable name “v_11” is filled in, i.e. not empty. The corresponding condition is: “v_11 greater ”, i.e. you leave the “Code” field empty.
Confirm with Save.
Next, switch back to the mail trigger by clicking on Back.
Optionally, you can execute the triggers in the questionnaire preview. For mail triggers, testing in the preview is not really useful. “u_e-mail” or any project variables used are not replaced correctly: they cannot be allocated to a participant account in the preview. Therefore, keep the checkbox deactivated. Instead create a test participant with an e-mail address to which you have access and use this account to test the questionnaire in productive mode.
You may also also optionally execute the trigger multiple times in one survey. This doesn’t make any sense in this example, therefore don’t activate the checkbox.
Save the settings.
Configuring Details
In the final step configure the mail to be sent.
Open the Detail configuration tab: It contains mail trigger-specific options.
Optionally, you can use a mail template of type “Standard mail”, filled according to the instructions below. If you choose this option, select the template first, then upload by clicking Apply mail template.
As this is a personalized survey, you can select the “u_email” wildcard from the drop-down list in the “mail dynamically from” field. If participants fill in the comment field, the wildcard will be replaced with the e-mail address which was saved for them in participant administration.
Enter the survey manager as mail recipient.
In the “Subject” field, enter the title “Employee survey feedback”.
In the “Mail text” field, enter the variable for the comment field “v_11”, enclosed by two hash signs (#). During the course of the survey this wildcard will be replaced with the participant’s entry
Leave the default setting for the dispatch date unchanged.
Confirm with Save.