The grid component is quite commonly used in surveys, rather like the customer satisfaction survey cards used in many businesses, and the structure will be quite familiar to most of us. The general format is to have a list of questions down one side of a page or card, with space to score each question out of five.
We're going to use a grid to survey our registering speakers and find out which aspects of their previous conference where the best and which aspects left them feeling that there was room for improvement. Conference organizers will then have sufficient information to focus their attentions properly when the results are collated on the Analysis page later and, hopefully, be able to wow everybody with their efficiency.
- On our components overview page, we create a new grid component by entering the name
Previous conference, selecting Grid from the component type list, checking the Mandatory box and clicking on Add. - To set up the scoring options for our users, we will enter the following into the Options textarea:
1|Poor 2|So-so 3|Okay 4|Rather good 5|Excellent
- The questions against which our users will indicate their score options will be entered in the Questions textarea:
Food|How was the food? Hotel|Was accommodation acceptable? Content|Were the workshops interesting? Organisation|Did everything run smoothly? Media|Were multi-media facilities adequate? Transport|Was adequate transportation available?
- To help our registering speakers understand what we require from them, let's also enter some descriptive text in the Description textarea:
Please rate these aspects of the last conference you attended (whether as a speaker or as a delegate). - Now we may save our grid component by clicking on Save component.
Webform will render our survey grid on the second page of our form. The scoring options are rendered as radio buttons so that only one option per question may be selected. As we have marked this component as being mandatory, each question becomes a required input and our speakers will need to answer all questions by selecting an appropriate scoring option.
Both the questions and selectable options need to be specified with a safe key value as well as a human-readable value, separated by the vertical pipe character. This is similar to the manner in which we specify select options.
When setting up our grid components we should take care to keep the option descriptions and questions as short as we can. Failure to do so may result in grids that appear squashed and are difficult for our users to read.
