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Add parent column to Alchemer survey_data table

Answered
Daniel Brierton User

Connector name: Alchemer

Table name: survey_data

Column to add: parent

API documentation link: https://apihelp.alchemer.com/help/surveyresponse-per-question-v5

 

Additional details:

For certain question types (Radio Button Grid, Dropdown Menu List, Grouping (Closed Card Sort) / Quick Sort and Semantic Differential), Alchemer's API presents subquestions at the top level of survey data when requesting responses. I'm not really sure why the do this, but as a result, the `id` doesn't match to a row in the `question` table for these types, but instead map to the `sub_question` table.

Having `parent `as a column will allow us to get the correct row from the `question` table as well as know when we should query the `sub_question` table with the `id` instead of the `question` table.

This is causing issues in some of our transformations as we're trying to get the page title for a given `survey_data` row, but we end up getting null since there's no corresponding row in `question` to get the `survey_page_id` from.

I think from poking around that ids are actually unique across both the `question` and `sub_question` table per `survey_id`, so we could potentially just join across both and hope for the best, but I've not been able to find any concrete documentation to confirm that. Having the `parent` column would be more robust though regardless.

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Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Sanjeevv Maniram T Fivetranner

    Hi Daniel,

    This is a valuable suggestion for enhancing the Alchemer connector. The request to add a parent column for clarity between question and sub_question relationships has been added to our feature improvements backlog.

    To better understand your needs, could you share more details about your downstream use cases? For example, how do you plan to leverage the parent column in your analytics or transformation workflows, and are there any specific pain points beyond retrieving the survey_page_id that this addition would address?

    We will keep the community updated on this thread with any progress.

    Thanks,
    Sanjeevv

  • Daniel Brierton User

    Hi Sanjeevv,

    Thanks for the quick response.

    We have some surveys where pages are displayed or not displayed depending on the answer to the previous questions. These pages have questions with the same text, so we're looking to differentiate them in our transformations in a human-readable way by prepending the page title to the question.

    We also do so some automatic translations of survey answers, so knowing more about what the questions types are allow us to filter better which answers we should pass through the translation ML model.

    Hope that covers what you were looking for. Let me know if you want any further info.

    Thanks,
    Daniel

  • Daniel Brierton User
    • Edited

    Hi Sanjeevv,

    Any update on when this might be implemented? It's still blocking a change in our transformations.

    Thanks,
    Daniel