Project Overview
The main goal of this project is to enable the user, or researcher, to build intelligent questionnaires and publish them to target users. The researcher should be able to create questionnaires that contain two types of questions; fill in blank and multiple choice questions. The creator of the questionnaire should be able to design the flow of the questionnaire based on the answers provided by the answerer. After the questionnaire is completed a final report is generated providing useful data to assist the researcher in his/her research.
The system was designed and developed to allow the researcher to enter rich content in the questions and answers like images, rich text and flash files to appear in the questionnaire. Finally, the researcher should be able to generate the final report in PDF or Word format as well as be able to send it via an email client.
Challenges
- The questionnaire has to be portable which means that it has to encapsulate the questionnaire content files, as well as the questionnaire runtime program and all its contents, in one small file. InspirationGate adapted a solution that combines XML to store the questionnaire data and a compression component to tie the XML files and their content together.
- Researchers should be able to complete their questionnaire relatively fast by using predefined questions. In order for InspirationGate to handle this challenge we spent a considerable amount of effort optimizing the search, saving, and loading components.
- The final report that is generated has to integrate with both word 2003 and 2007. To guarantee the compatibility, InspirationGate used only rich text format standards to generate the final report, without compromising the quality of the report provided by the customer.
Provided Solution
InspirationGate provided a two modules solution:
Questionnaire Designer - This application provides the questions repository and management tool. The researchers should be able to use, add, edit and delete questions to the question bank. The designer also facilitates a number of features to build questionnaires. The most important features are the questionnaire designer, font and styling, final report manager and questionnaire compiler.
Questionnaire Runtime - This application is used to process the questionnaire for the user to answer. It starts by loading the first question to the user to answer and based on the provided answer the questionnaire runtime engine loads the next appropriate question. This process lasts until the answerer finishes answering all the applicable questions. Finally, the runtime application opens a window allowing the user to generate the final report or send the questionnaire to another user via email.
Technologies
Visual Studio 2005, .NET 1.1/2.0, C#.