How to set up my app/tables for a complex survey

Question

Hi all,New to quickbase, though not to databases in general and I want to get started the right way.  My app is a series of four surveys.  Initially, I was assuming I would create each survey question as a field.  And a record would be a completed survey.  So each of my four tables would have survey question numbers as column headers and partner names as row headers.  Would this be the correct way to organize the data or is there something more effective?  If so, is there a way to create a report where I could select three partners and place those in three columns then the rows would be the question numbers and I could see the results vertically? I'm used to cross tab queries in access and haven't been able to make the paradigm shift yet, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

QuickBaseCoachD · Answer

The problem with that approach is that it makes it more difficult to analyze the results by question.

A better approach is to have each question be a child record to the survey and do the data entry in grid edit.

The each discrete Question can be analyzed separately and for example easily ranked up by questions most happy or unhappy.

The low tech way to get the child questions onto the Survey form is to use to create the 4 model Surveys each with its correct master Template questions. Then use the wizard help to create a button to import those children into the survey.

here is some help on how to do that.

Then you can have 4 different buttons to import the 4 different sets of child records.

Then have a form rule to control which button to show depending on some drop down field of the survey type. I also suggest hiding those buttons when there are already child records, so it does not get create automatically.

It would also be possible to come up with a way to have the child records get auto created when the survey is first saved, but that's more advanced stuff.

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