Survey Assure

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

I clicked “Close Survey” hours ago - why hasn’t my survey been marked as “closed”?

Depending on the number of responses, this process can take time. On average, the tool will take roughly ~7-8 seconds per response being imported. Therefore 1000 responses would take roughly 7,000 seconds, or roughly 2 hours. If the process is “stuck” for more time than you anticipate, click on “Invalidate Cache” under the “Settings” page and try again.

Composites are taking a while to calculate - why?

Composites can involve complex calculations which become more complex as more responses are registered or more numerators are added. While a survey is live, these calculations will need to be done every time a composite is loaded. For this reason, we highly recommend only building composites AFTER you have closed a survey (from the settings page). This will allow the program to calculate the composites once and cache the results, often improving performance by over 75% (please see the “Benchmarks” section of the API’s README for more information).

Someone answered a survey but it isn’t showing up in Survey Assure - why?

  • Was the listener successfully created when you created the survey? (see section “Data Sources”)
  • Did you create an exclusion rule that could have blocked the platform from registering the response (see section “Best Practices”)?
  • Was there an network error which prevented the listener from receiving the response?

Regardless of the reason, you can re-import survey responses from the “Settings” page at any time. This process is also run when you “Close Survey”.

I added composites/composite groups but they aren’t showing up in the table of contents - why?

If your survey has been “closed” the application caches your table of contents. This cache item is short lived and will be rebuilt after 10 minutes. In the event that your table of contents isn’t updating in real time, you can either wait for the cache to invalidate (reload the page after 10 minutes) or you can manually invalidate the cache from the “Settings” page.

Why can’t I edit questions/question groups?

A core principle of the tool involves immutability. For this reason, the application separates itself into two “layers”: the data layer and the presentation layer.

The data layer is anything that is imported directly from a data source and is always immutable – questions and question groups are part of this layer. The presentation layer, which is made up of composites and composite groups, can be built and customized to your needs.

What are some good platforms that support NodeJS deployments?

There are hundreds of viable options online, each of varying difficulty, some cloud-based, some more traditional-hosting-based, and many offering free tiers.

If I delete a survey, is my data lost?

Survey Assure creates a one way connection going from your data source to Survey Assure. This means that when you delete something in Survey Assure, it does NOT change anything in your data source. So no, data is not lost when a survey is deleted in Survey Assure.

On the flip side, if a survey is deleted from your data source, the data will persist in Survey Assure unless you delete it in Survey Assure as well, however due to the one way nature of the tool, there is no way to pipe that back to your data source.

Is sensitive information ever sent to the Blockchain?

No. We only send a Merkle Root to the Blockchain, which is a single hashed value that has no meaning in any spoken language, but can be used to prove that responses were not altered after they entered the Survey Assure platform.