Survey coding programs free how to#
Survey coding programs free code#

Survey coding programs free how to#

This is a very primitive solution, but you can see the skeleton of how to create a quite sophisticated online survey system, one that can display the results as percentages, bar graphs, you could even have a pie chart if you were motivated! ** show the error in a reasonably cool format **/ The final routine to see here is the error function: Also note that the usual 'Content-type: text/html' must be output before any of the HTML is produced, as always. Here you can see that the file is read and tallied each time, with the true and false answers stored in the answerstring array. Printf('%d answered FALSE ', answerstring) Printf('%d answered TRUE ', answerstring) That's done with the show_results() routine: Once you have a growing log file, you unquestionably want to show survey takers the answers compiled so far. Instead, the inline conditional answer? 'T':'F' evaluates to the 'T' character if the answer is 1, and 'F' if answer is 0.īecause of how most servers have the permissions set, you'll probably need to create the log file with the touch command and make sure it has permission so that your CGI scripts (which will probably run as user Web, to solve the problem, making sure that the directory is mode 755 to avoid too much trouble. I could directly write the value of answer in the log file, as a 0 or 1, but it would take up more space (each would be an int) and it'd be impossible to edit or view with regular UNIX utilities. ** append the user answer to the survey **/ Once you have the answer as either true or false (1 or 0, of course), you need to open and append it to the log file. If you have any weirdness with this CGI script, this is a likely spot for the problem! This means that we don't have to worry about the situation where the getenv() returns a NULL that we then feed to the strlen() function. I am taking advantage of one trick here: on a conditional statement that has a logical OR between its expressions ( a || b) the second expression isn't evaluated if the first is true. If (((cp = getenv('QUERY_STRING')) = NULL) ||

Survey coding programs free code#

An easy addition here would be to indicate that a zero-length QUERY_STRING simply shows the results instead of the error message, which you'd accomplish by changing the above code to the following: With this code, the only way that you can see the answers to the survey are to answer it yourself, which isn't necessarily the best way to code this. Makes handling errors quite a bit easier. In this case, as with many other CGI programs I develop, I've opted to have an error() routine that displays to the user the specified message and then immediately exits from the script. If ((cp = getenv('QUERY_STRING')) = NULL)Īnswer = (*(cp + 7) = 'T') /* test the first character only */ So it's a simple step of getting the QUERY_STRING variable then looking at the eighth letter to see if it's a T or F, as you can see in the code snippet below: Which means that the QUERY_STRING variable looks like:

When the user clicks on the 'tally my answer' button, the URL that is built looks like: To receive the survey, the resultant CGI program in C as usual is straightforward because we're insisting on using the METHOD=GET, which ensures that the answer is passed in the QUERY_STRING variable, and because we don't have to parse the resultant value. Sites like Parent Soup use it to very good effect. Nonetheless, it's an easy little device you can use to add some interactivity to an existing page. (Well, in this case it's yes and no, but the concept is the same!) This is the simplest of all possible surveys, of course a single question and two possible answers, true or false. This appears on screen as shown in figure 1. Note that if you strip out all the formatting, the entire form boils down to a five line form: I think that watching television improves your mind: The core of the HTML that you need to ask the survey question is shown here: To display the survey results, you simply open up the log file, tally all the yes and no answers, and display them on the screen. The basic idea is simple: a Web page includes a survey question that's really a form, and the answer is added to a log file that contains the combined answers from all survey takers.

I'd like to show a very simple solution that you can expand to create a pretty cool new area on your Web site: an online survey system. He's also CTO of The Internet Mall, the largest shopping site on the Net. Dave Taylor is the president of interface design firm Intuitive Systems and author of many best-selling books on UNIX and Web page design.