Preparing a large prepop
Problem
You need to prepop a large number of data fields. You want to simplify the task and reduce the risk of human error.
Solution
Use cwprepop.cgi to create a template of the questions to include in your .scw file based on the data to prepop.
Discussion
Let's say you received a data file of administrative data that need to be included in a survey data base — maybe to recall some administrative values in the questionnaire or to produce an integrated data base at the end of the data collection to ease the statistical analysis. There are dozens (or hundreds!) of data fields, some open-ended, some simply categorised. There are alphanumeric fields and numeric fields, and among the latter, there are integer fields and real values. What a mess! It is going to take hours to craft the CallWeb questions to properly prepop all of these data, and there is a clear risk that some data will be given an incorrect data type.
Call cwprepop.cgi to the rescue. From the integrated module (cw.cgi), cwprepop.cgi can be instructed to "create an scw from a tab-delimited". Here is what you have to do:
Here is what CallWeb will do:
Review the .scw file that is produced to make sure that CallWeb's assumptions and observations are reasonable in your own situation.