Elapsed Time

Recently we did a review of the searches that have been entered into our website and noticed that someone was searching the site using the words “Elapsed Time”. When we saw this we assumed they were looking for a way to work out how long a survey has taken. So in this article we will look at some of the things that you can do record how long a survey takes.

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Debugging Quotas

When writing quota scripts one of the hardest things to do is to figure out if they will work or not. For a while the only way to test them was to Activate the survey onto the server but very quickly it was realised that a new method was required. In this article we will show you how to set your professional up so that you can debug your quotas scripts on your local machine.

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Learn Javascript Lesson 7a : Integrated Count Down

As a follow up to the excellent javascript ‘Count Down’ example, I wanted to show you how to extend this functionality such that the ‘Count down’ is fully automated and doesn’t require either:

  • Specific references to the the variable name, and
  • Specific reference to the maximum number of characters declared in the variable

Assuming you have the Lesson 7 example working, these are the general next steps required:

  1. Move the mrData tags and HTML code specific to the ‘Count down’ functionality into a Question sub-template, along with additional mrData tags for automation
  2. Move the core javascript code into an external file (.js) and reference that external file from the new Question sub-template
  3. Modify the metadata file so that the variable in question references the new Question sub-template

Let’s take a look at each step in turn

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Killing two birds with one stone

Recently we were asked by our friends in India if we had any information around running Data Collection surveys for mobile devices. We don’t have anything , but we wonder if you do and would like to share it ? We have also created a survey that we would like you to try on your mobile device. If you don’t have a mobile device that can use the internet we would still like you to take this survey as it asks you amongst other things what you think about the IBM / SPSS acquisition. We will report our findings out at the end of the month.

Thanks once again to 2×4 consulting for letting us use their servers

Tip of the day: mrStudio and memory usage

I was speaking to a friend the other day, and they told me something that I would like to share with you all.  They had been editing a large MDD file in mrStudio. The MDD file was around 1 meg, and after a few hours of just editing and saving, no running the survey, mrStudio began to slow. Looking in task manager they noticed that studio was using 1.3 gig of memory. For obvious reasons they thought they’d better close studio and re-open it to clean the memory usage up, but studio crashed and they thought they had lost their last few changes.

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