Analysis

Testing a carousel feature in WP

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Here are some images/links to IBM Thought Leadership that the team i work for has helped produce. In most cases Unicom intelligence, SPSS Statistics and Modeler have been used to provide analytical insight into the data collected to help drive and validate the content in these documents. If you work in the Government or Education sectors, then these are for you. Happy Clicking (If you want more info then please feel free to drop me a email at dporton@au1.ibm.com )

Add Context , Populate & Strip HTML out

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You would have recently seen in LinkedIn that Barb asked the following question. “When you add html code into your survey, it displays beautifully but then it displays as code in your tabs. Is there a way in a DMS to globally eliminate any HTML code?” and I pointed him to a post that had been written awhile ago. Also in my comment I mentioned that I had a script that would add a context to an MDD and then strip out the HTML and put just the text in it. This article shows you the code for that script.

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How many concurrents : Part 2

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In this article we are going to create the final DMS script that we use to recode the concurrents.csv file created in the previous article into something that is richer and usable for tabulation. The final output file will  be in a DataCollection Data file ( ddf ) format. This article assumes that you have some basic knowledge of DMS and VBA scripting.

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How many concurrents : Part 1

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Ever wanted to know what has been going on with your DataCollection Server Web concurrents? Interested in finding out if you are going over your limit of allowable concurrents frequently? If the answer to these questions is yes , then this set of articles is for you. In it we will show you how to look at the log files produced on your servers and calculate what has been going on and when. It should be noted that this article assumes that you have some knowledge of Data Management scripts as well as Tables scripts and VBA.

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Clean a specified Context of HTML

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Ever wanted to get rid of the html from a specific context? Have you needed to create a clean MDD and get rid of the annoying characters that are messing up your Reports for survey tables? If the answer is yes to either one or both of these questions then you should read this article. In it we explain how to open up your MDD  file in your dms script and clean the metadata of all those unwanted characters before you export the data.

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Quick Question : What spec hardware should I buy?

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Recently we where asked what spec hardware should we buy for our new Data Collection Interview Server setup, and we had to honestly reply we don’t know, but we know people that might have an in stite on some rules that they used. So … When you purchased your setup , how did you decide what hardware to buy? Did you use any sort of sizing calculator or was it just a guess?

If you did not use any sort of calculator, but have a setup in use and its working for you, what spec machines do you have , how many emails do you send out , and what is your response rate for WEB and CATI ?  How many questions do you have on average in your surveys? What does DimensionNet or Interview Administrator say your max con-currents are ?

We would love to hear from you be it from a comment on this article or a email to admin@smarterDimensions.com if you are willing to send us all your IVW* log files ( from all servers in the cluster )  then that would be great , we plan to run some articles on how we can write programs to read these and work out actual concurrency and then perhaps come up with a sizing calculator. So anything you send us will help us write a realy cool set of articles and scripts. We promise that all confidentiality will be kept and no names will be given as to whose setup is who’s

Regards
The Smarter Dimensions Team.

PS We cannot do this without your input !!

Quick Post : The missing documentation for EvaluateDerivedIteration

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Another post from forgetdata, this time it is about EvaluateDerivedIteration.

Some of you may have noticed the new feature in PASW Reports for Surveys (nee. Desktop Reporter) which enables you to build new derived grid variables via the UI using the Variables->New Grid menu item. In case you don’t appreciate the usefulness of this feature I’ll spell it out: Read More

Create your own RSS 2.0 Feed

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After we had created our code corner site we decided that we would like to add a RSS 2.0 feed to it. The site is generated using a BB3 board and at this stage they have not created a RSS feed add-on for it so we were left to do this on our own. This article shows you how to create a RSS feed with an MRS script.

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