Web Service

Connecting to External Web Services

Sometimes it’s useful to bring additional information from a website into your survey. For example, you can pull in the top 10 Headlines from CNN.com for a current events survey. You can even write your own web program and then integrate accordingly.

To connect your survey to a web service:

  1. Open your Survey Flow.
  2. Click Add Below or Add a New Element Here anywhere in your Survey Flow.
  3. Click Web Service.
  4. Click the Move button on the Web Serviceand drag it to the top of your Survey Flow.
  5. Paste the URL of your RSS Feed into the URL field of your Web Service.
  6. Click Test URL to make sure the URL is correct and see which information you are able to pull from the RSS Feed. A box appears.
  7. In the box, select any fields that you want to use in your survey, and click Add Embedded Data.
  8. Take note of the fields that now appear in the Set Embedded Data section of your Web Service. You can change these field names and add or remove fields.
  9. Save the Survey Flow.
  10. To display any of these fields in your survey, click Piped Text on the question or choice you’d like the field to appear. Type the name of your field.

Example: Random Number Generator

In some experiments, it may be useful to display a random number to the survey participant.

To set up a random number generator:

  1. In Survey Flow, add a Web Service element with the following URL: http://reporting.qualtrics.com/projects/randomNumGen.php
  2. If desired, you can specify a “min” and “max” value for the random number by passing those parameters to the web service. Once set up, your Web Service element should look like this:
  3. To display the random number in the survey, you will use the Piped Text feature to pipe in the Embedded Data field called “random.” It will look like this: ${e://Field/random}.

More Information on Web Services

  • RSS feeds let you access them with no strings attached, but more advanced Web Services may require information from you before they can send you anything back. If this is the case, click Add a parameter to send to the web service in the Web Services element, underneath the Web Service URL, and enter in any necessary field names and values.
  • To see which data the participant received from the web service, look for the embedded data fields as separate columns in your data set, or as separate items at the bottom of your reports.