Question and Answer tables

[oldblindpew]

I'm trying to create a set of question and answer tables, similar to the
tables in Duane Hookom's "At Your Survey" sample application. In his answer
table, the field for the response value is type Text. My question: What do
you do about response values of other types, such as Numeric, Boolean,
Multiple Choice, Option Groups, etc.? It is typically the case that not all
questions in a list will be answered with text.
Thanks,
OldBlindPew

 

[Jeff Boyce]

I may be remembering an earlier version, but I thought Duane's At Your
Survey allowed for more than one answer "type"...

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

--
Disclaimer: This author may have received products and services mentioned
in this post. Mention and/or description of a product or service herein
does not constitute endorsement thereof.

Any code or pseudocode included in this post is offered "as is", with no
guarantee as to suitability.

You can thank the FTC of the USA for making this disclaimer
possible/necessary.

 

[oldblindpew]

The Data Type for Duane's field is Text. He does allow the user to
categorize survey questions by type (Identification, Demographic,
Statistical, or Comment), but the responses are all stored as Text. The
application must have some means of interpreting the responses numerically
where appropriate.

In general, to avoid a wide table with a field for each question/response,
we instead need a tall table with a row for each question. This means all
responses will go in a single column (field) which can only have one data
type. Somehow it will be necessary to learn how to treat a "Response to a
Question" as a single entity when in fact the responses will vary in format.

I can imagine several possible approaches:
1. Decide on one data type such as "Text" and somehow force all responses to
use it by programmatically manipulating the text data.
2. Add a field for each different type of response and use whichever one is
appropriate, leaving the others empty for that particular record.
3. Split the response table into different tables based on type of response.

Thanks,
OldBlindPew

 

[Duane Hookom]

I thought at one time, I had a field [RspnsType] in the questions table that
identified the expected data type of the answer. This could have been used to
enforce appropriate data entry and convert the text value for processing.