Re: design sanity check/advice

GDW wrote:

Surveys exist in 3 distinct phases:
survey design, survey response entry and survey analysis/reporting.

Hmm, I just can't get my head around this.

Am I right in thinking that these are the three phases of actually preparing a survey, posting the survey to a web page (or bringing the sheets to the town square to have passers-by answer questions), and then examining the answers back in the office?

(If not then ignore the rest of my waffling.)

If so, then I don't really see why there would be different classes to represent these entities during the three different phases (which is why I think I'm misunderstanding something here).

I'd have thought that the same Survey class would be used in each of these phases: during the preparation phase, you'd have a GUI to allow the creation of Surveys and the population of these Surveys with Pages and Questions. Posting the survey to a web page would involve a Servlet (for example) reading the Survey information and presenting it as appropriate, and finally the analysis would involve some tool reading the information from the Survey and presenting some nice graphs.

My point being: I don't see a different type of Survey in each phase.

Perhaps to make things clearer, you give an example of the, "Design phase," SurveyDefinition: can you show how this would differ from the, "Entry phase," Survey class?


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Any suggestions/advice/admonitions/coaching/counseling/encouragement
and/or hot stock tips would be greatly appreciated.

For what it's worth, whereas, "Survey," and, "Question," seem like good classes, "Page," seems a little odd. The first two are inherent to the surveys themselves, but, "Page," seems more like a presentation issue; I don't think it makes sense to define how many pages a Survey might have when thinking up the questions it should offer. On the other hand, I could see how something like a QuestionGroup might be a useful subdivision

How, as a matter of interest, are you going to create Surveys and have your clients answer them? Do you have a configuration tool for creating them, and a servlet for answering them?

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