Passing responses between questions
You can pass the response to a question into any following question as text. The question that you are passing from is called the source question and the question that you are passing to is called the destination question. The passing of responses from a source question to a destination question is called Piping.
Important: For a detailed description of how piping works, including examples of using piping with different question types, see Using Piping.
- Identify and note the number of the question that you want to use as a source question in the Edit tab. In the following example, we will use question 1.
- Right-click the question that you want to use as the destination question and choose Edit. The destination question can be any question that follows the source question. For this example, we will use question 2 as the destination question.
- Place your cursor where you want to insert the source question's response. Type [Q1] which will cause Vista to display the response from the source question as text. Vista uses special identifier codes to signify the location of the item to be inserted. Questions are identfied using the notation [Qn] where "n" is the question number. In our example, the identifier for question 1 is [Q1].
- Click OK.
- To test the piping that you configured, click Test Logic on the Edit tab.
Important: To pipe the answer from one question to a following question, there must be at least one page break between the source and destination questions. Using the example above, you will need to insert a Page Break between Question 1 and Question 2. If you are piping from Question 2 to Question 5, you will need to insert a Page Break somewhere between Question 2 and Question 5. For more information about inserting page breaks, see Adding a page break.
Here are some examples of pipe codes for various question types. These examples assume the question you want to pipe is Question 1.
- Multiple Choice / Yes-No / Drop-Down
- [Q1] returns the text of the selected option
- Select Many
- [Q1] returns the text of all the selected options with comma separators, e.g. Option 1, Option 2
- [Q1.1] returns the text of the first option if selected, or a blank value if not selected
- Other Text Box
- [Q1a] returns the text of the Other Text Box
- Text Box / Text Area / Number Box / Password
- [Q1] returns the text of the answer
- Rank Items
- [Q1] returns the items selected in rank order with comma separators, e.g. Option1, Option 2
- [Q1.1] returns the first item selected
- Form Questions
- The first form item can be referenced by substituting [Q1a] for [Q1] in the examples above, second form item is [Q1b], etc.
- Matrix Questions
- The first matrix row can be referenced by substituting [Q1a] for [Q1] in the examples above, second matrix row is [Q1b], etc.
NOTE: You can see the identifiers for each question and question option using the Condensed view in the Edit tab.
Using URL Parameters in a Survey
Advanced Ask if Logic
Assigning a Value to Answers
Setting up Scoring in a Survey or Quiz