Limesurvey import/export

[benzea]

It should be pretty straight forward to create a limesurvey import/export.

AC:

• Find documentation about Limesurvey description format
• Check how well it maps to SDAPS
• Create a conversion module from Limesurvey to LaTeX (without a project)
• Create an exporter to limesurvey from an SDAPS (project)

Interesting thing, the sdaps command line structure doesn't quite fir to this, because no project dir is needed for the "import" (i.e. LaTeX file generation).

[benzea]

There seem to be three possible choices (see https://manual.limesurvey.org/Exporting_a_survey_structure):

• LSS format: this exposes the internal data structure
• Tab separated format: https://manual.limesurvey.org/Tab_Separated_Value_survey_structure
• QueXML format: At least well documented

The LSS format is probably the best choice with regard to getting all the information. However, it is also the most obscure, as it appears to be simply a flat database dump.

See https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/tree/master/docs/demosurveys for examples.

For example, the question type is encoded as a letter, the lookup table for that an be found here:

• https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/application/models/Question.php#L775
• https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/application/models/Question.php#L471

The documentation for the tab separated values file is probably helpful. It looks like the format are almost identical and the descriptions from there should map to the LSS XML format.

[benzea]

Note that using the tab file could be a good idea, as it says:

Although you could also try mapping to the .lss format, the advantage of this format is that it doesn't require you to keep track of foreign key relationships between groups, questions, subquestions, answers, and defaults.

and the format seems to be better documented (i.e. more likely to be stable). The limitation of not support SGQA does not matter to us.

[benzea]

I changed the command line structure to require the project after the command. This solves the issue that the importer does not need an SDAPS project. See commit 262a74c.