When ticking a other field, should the entering of a text be mandatory or not?

I think it shouldn't be enforced or be possible to specify.

Currently (Optional question) with other field are not showing a popup or warning when no text is entered. Might be another ticket, but that can be decided later.

jelo, can you upload a small sample survey?

About your question: There is one (or probably more) ticket about other field and mandatory check where developer lemeur explains the handling and the changes which were made a few weeks ago.

Survey attached.
Two questions. All "Non mandatory".

First question type "List (radio)" with other field.
Second question type "Multiple options" with other field.

On both questions you tick the other field but didn't enter any text into the field.

On "List (radio)" nothing happens (no warning).
On "Multiple options" you get a warning that you entered no text. The warning is a popup. Config is set to $showpopups = 0;

When doing the same with all questions mandatory nothing changed.

Question is: Would it make sense to force people to fill out the text field
only when mandatory is choosen?.

Personally I like it when I can tick other, but aren't forced to enter something.

Thibault, I assign this one to you (ElMatador is on vacation) because you ahve dealt with this mandatory stuff before. Maybe you can explain if the current behavior is caused by design or if it's a bug.

See http://docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php?page=Question+attributes#other_comment_mandatory for a full explaination of this.

In summary this is no bug: type M question must enforce other text input as the checkbox is just a visual helper but has no true meaning in DB.

<quote>Personally I like it when I can tick other, but aren't forced to enter something. </quote>
The use type P question (checkbox + comments).
Fixing this requires creating a new question type because fixing the old one would make old survey structures and exported data not compatibles.

Thanks for the link. This answer my additional question. Sorry that I didn't searched the documentation for that.

Back to the main issue. The Popup when "multiple options" "Other textfield" is empty and $showpopups = 0;

Is that reproducible with the sample survey?

I can disbale the popup when showpopups=0. But this will lead in participant checking the "other checkbox" without filling in the other text ==> nothing will be recorded in DB so the answer will be considered to be "not answered" and not "Other".

Carsten, you're opinion on this ?

Not sure if I misunderstand something but I thought that instead of the Javascript popup the red error message will be displayed and the user is still forced to fill it out.

showpopups refers only to popups AFTER a page was submitted and there are still mandatory answers missing. Unfortunately there are also some checks which occurs before the page is submitted.

@jelo,

Carsten explained it right: the mandatory check code that is evaluated after submission of a page (and which is able to display red error message) is not used for this specific case. The popup that is displayed in this case is just a check on the current page, and if it fails it cancels the submit page action so that the mandatory check code is not run.

I have to set this ticket as won't fix because trying to fix this would require too much work on LS1. LS2 design won't let such weird things occur.

Regards,
Thibault