Dear bkgray ,

Thank you for suggesting a feature.

However, we will not be picking this up because the use case is too specific or the use case might not fit to the latest versions of LimeSurvey.

Other reasons why the feature is dropped could also be, it has been implemented already.

Please check on the latest versions and if the issue still exists, feel free to re-open the report.

kind regards,
galads

I am picking this one up since for several of our customers, this becomes an important requirement. We basically need to be able to define additional meta data fields for surveys. These are used in different ways for different projects:

1. Some users simply want to classify their surveys by defining and assigning a survey type.
2. Others want to outline which department or part of the organisation is responsible for a survey.
3. One customer uses dozens of survey copies to evaluate their lessons. They want to define details like location, course type, online/offline, teacher, academic course the evaluation belongs to, faculty

There are many examples like this. So far we have solved this by coding our own meta data plugin to store those details. But it would be perfect if the survey model could provide fields for this.
We are using that information for our custom reporting dashboards e.g. to apply filters or for custom survey overviews which can then be sorted or filtered based on these attributes.

Please consider adding this to the future LS 6.x version.
Let me know if more details are needed.

Personally : i use Equation question type for such usage.
Then : you have the data in the response line too

It can be easy to create a plugin for this : https://manual.limesurvey.org/SetVariableExpressionEnd
Sample : https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/tree/master/application/core/plugins/expressionFixedDbVar

Maybe a core plugin.

Some users simply want to classify their surveys by defining and assigning a survey type.

This sounds like tags?

Others want to outline which department or part of the organisation is responsible for a survey.

Can also be covered by tags, maybe? Or you need more info attached to each tag?

One customer uses dozens of survey copies to evaluate their lessons. They want to define details like location, course type, online/offline, teacher, academic course the evaluation belongs to, faculty

All these should be searchable, I assume?

Add survey attributes should have different types, like datetime attribute, free text, dropdown, etc?

Others want to outline which department or part of the organisation is responsible for a survey.
Can also be covered by tags, maybe? Or you need more info attached to each tag?

It's not the SurveyGroup task ?

One customer uses dozens of survey copies to evaluate their lessons. They want to define details like location, course type, online/offline, teacher, academic course the evaluation belongs to, faculty

Equation question : because in general you want to have it in analysis.

@ollehar, you can call it "tags" or "survey attributes", it is basically the same.

Yes, searching them is often used at our custom dashboards. We either use a simple search field or of there are predefined lists, we do a "SELECT DISTINCT" on the attribute and then generate a dropdown with the output for applying a filter.

@ollehar, you can call it "tags" or "survey attributes", it is basically the same.

I'd argue it's two different features. Especially in terms of UX, tags are very common and pretty easy to understand and use. Custom attributes is a more advanced feature. Tags usually have no further info than just the tag name itself, and a survey either has it or not.

@DenisChenu:

1. A survey can only be assigned to a single survey group. So you can either use groups to define departments or to define a location or something else, but you can not attribute several details to a survey. I like the concept of survey groups but it has limits.

2. No, equations don't help a lot since we are aggregating data of several surveys at our overviews. So these survey attributes or tags reside at a level above. We do not need those details at response level.

@ollehar: Yes, in this case it really comes to two different features. Survey attributes which could also be used as placeholders within a survey e.g. to easily replace 2022 by 2023 at next years survey and survey tags to assign additional meta data to a survey.
I think technically, both still belong to the survey object.

@Mazi : about SurveyGroup : it's only point 2 «outline which department or part of the organisation is responsible for a survey.»

About equations : yes, thi is not in search/filter list, but if you don't need it when aggregating data of several surveys, i think it's needed a lot.

About tag and search : yes, the filter on Survey Listing must really be improved … starting by filter for each column (if you have a group «Example» and some survey using «Example» in name : you have both … no way to get only «Example» in name.
Having a tag can be a good idea too.

Tags can be more general too, e.g. tag questions, groups, etc. So it's meaningful to make that a separate feature.

Would encryption of survey attributes be needed, @Mazi ? Localization or translation?

Feel free to do a "moscow": must-have, should-have, could-have and won't-have.

@ollehar, I think encryption will not be needed. We can ignore that 1% using it :-)