Add support for answers given as a range

[getodk-bot]

Issue by mitchellsundt
Thursday Jul 09, 2015 at 17:38 GMT
Originally opened as getodk/getodk#187 (3 comment(s))

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Originally reported on Google Code with ID 186

Enhancement.

Many answers we get are given as a range: 1-2 weeks, 3-4 days, etc.  Is there some
way that a type of answer can be a range (I'm thinking two sliders of numbers, like
the ones used for dates?)

Reported by Emily.Kumpel on 2011-02-17 17:50:51

[getodk-bot]

Comment by mitchellsundt
Thursday Jul 09, 2015 at 17:38 GMT

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Reported by wbrunette on 2011-03-01 05:06:10

• Labels added: Type-Enhancement
• Labels removed: Type-Defect

[getodk-bot]

Comment by mitchellsundt
Thursday Jul 09, 2015 at 17:38 GMT

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Reported by mitchellsundt on 2011-07-09 03:50:53

• Labels added: Collect

[getodk-bot]

Comment by jnordling
Thursday Sep 01, 2016 at 20:13 GMT

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I like this idea, would this be a select_multiple with an appearance option for "range". humm or would that make sense, because when it is stored as a select_multiple which may not make sense due to the way aggregate stores select_multiple. Which data type are you thinking for this?

[jnordling]

@yanokwa or @lognaturel how are you feeling about this?

[lognaturel]

I don't understand the use case well enough to know how this would best be addressed. I would tend to address a range either with two questions (what is the min, what is the max) or with a text field with a regex constraint (number dash number).

I think that the original poster may have meant a number picker instead of a slider? If you have an example of this kind of question in use or a UI sketch, that would help possibly move this forward.

[yanokwa]

I've sent an email to Emily to see if she can clarify.

I agree with @lognaturel that you can do this with two questions (max-min) or even a question that asks the number and then another question that asks what the +/- is.

@jnordling Is there a use-case that you are thinking of? What would you expect the UI to look like?

[yanokwa]

I got a response from Emily!

When we were setting up the survey, we would ask a question like “How many days in the month does the water usually come” and answers like “3”, “3-4”, or, “3-5”… etc. We tried to do these on two separate questions, but it confused the enumerators when they didn’t get a range (i.e., do they enter 3 twice if the answer is just ‘3’?). We ended up doing a character input where they could use a ‘-’…which was okay, but meant more cleanup (I think we also tried a multi select of radio buttons so they could select 3 and 4, but that was also confusing.

I (poorly) sketched out what I was thinking in the attached photo. For the first option top option, better than my picture, think of the slider bars on Kayak when you’re looking at things like landing/takeoff time (screen shot pasted below). Else, the second option uses two of the ‘date’ style selectors...

Sketch 1

Sketch 2

I also think I filed this before it was possible to do multiple questions per page - that may have helped?

[lognaturel]

Either of those interfaces would be nice and it's true that they'd be better than separate controls. I think that with either interface, something new would need to be introduced at the ODK XForms spec level.

To make matters a little more confusing, W3C XForms does include a range control described here but what it does is show a slider of a certain range for a user to select a single value. Looks like @spatialdude and @MartijnR have already had some discussion about supporting it at XLSForm/pyxform#79.

So we'd have to make sure that whatever we decide on for this control type doesn't cause confusion with that other one. Also, I don't think it's possible for a control to provide two values so either the range would have to be represented as a single value (string like "X-Y" for example) or the widget would need to be represented as two separate controls in the form. One wacky idea would be to have a group appearance that can combine two range controls or two spinner controls (as in #105).

@MartijnR I'd be interested on some initial high-level feedback on whether you think this is a good thing to support and then if so I can file a issue in the XForms spec repo.

[MartijnR]

Yes, let's discuss capturing a range as a spec addition and see if there is a nice way to do this. Hopefully something that already exists or that builds upon a range control that captures a single value.

[lognaturel]

Closing pending spec addition.