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WebSurvey@UW - Answer Piping

This document describes the answer piping feature in WebSurvey@UW.

Displaying the answer to one question in the text of another subsequent question is called answer piping. For example, imagine that you have a page that asks a respondent for his or her first name. On a later page, you would like to repeat that first name in the text of a question to give the survey a more personal feel. This can be accomplished using answer piping.

To create answer piping:

1. In the “Modify Survey” screen, navigate to the question with the answer that you will want to “pipe” to text of another question(s).
2. Click on the pipe button which is located in the buttons to the right of the question.



Clicking on this button will cause a small window to open containing the pipe token for this question. Pipe tokens are bits of text which reference a specific answer that can be pasted anywhere in a subsequent question’s text. Pipe tokens are automatically assigned and are formatted as ###xxxx###, where xxxx represents the ID of the item whose answer you would like inserted in another location.

3. Select the pipe token in the textbox of this window and copy this to the clipboard as shown below.



4. Navigate to the question where you would like this answer to appear in the question text.
5. Paste this pipe token into the actual item text where you would like the response to the original question to be displayed.

In this example, if the survey respondent answered that her first name was “Susan,” that answer would be piped to this question and “Susan” would be displayed in place of ###1289###.