Survey Creation and Deployment using Livecode

[Archie]

Hi All
This is going to be a bit vague and I am sorry for that, but I hope you can help with some where to start advice.

I am developing a survey which will ask participants about their retirement planning. The survey needs to be distributed to between 600 and 800 people in two large organisations, and spread over a huge number of offices and locations. Once participants have answered my questions the program needs to write an individual report based on their responses. The report will basically sum scores across several of the questions and then populate the sections based on pre-determined text. This report would ideally be a PDF so participants can save or print or do whatever they want with their reports. Finally this survey needs to send responses back to me (or save them somewhere where i can download them) for group level analysis. I have been told that a large proportion of my participants have limited computer literacy so it needs to be really easy for them to get started and understand what to do once they are in the program.

Does anyone know of any resources that can help me get started with this? I was imagining building a standalone for web but am struggling to find information for dummies about how this works and what I will need to do to get it working (e.g. how do I go from hitting the 'save as standalone' to putting it on a webpage that I can send an email link to). How does the web-standalone send data to external sources and how do I direct that? I was considering LC because I have a lot of experience with building simple experiments and creating executable files for use within my local network and am comfortable with LC with desktop deployment but this is the first project where I need to deploy it externally and will not be in the next room for troubleshooting. Any advice on how to get started or where to look for information would be greatly appreciated.

[Mark]

Hi,

If I understand you correctly, you want to use a revlet, i.e. a stack that needs a plugin to run in a browser. Don't do that. Many people won't understand how to install the plugin, others won't have the possibility to install the plugin and again some others may install the plugin on a 64 bit machine and be unable to get it to work because the plugin is for 32 bit.

I would make a simple website with web forms. Store the answers in a MySQL database. You can write php scripts to analyse the data. You might also use LiveCode server instead of php. You could present the results as a printable website and people can print to a PDF if they want. Additionally, you could provide a downloadable text or rtf file and you might also use Qartam to create a PDF with LiveCode server.

Kind regards,

Mark