As explained above, a looping section provides a quick way to ask the same set of questions about a group of entities.
These entities are grouped by type and are part of a table that is known as a ‘loop source’. The following table is an example of a loop source:
Region |
Country |
Europe |
Portugal |
Europe |
Germany |
South America |
Brazil |
Each column header corresponds to a loop item type and each of the records in that column is a loop item. Europe and South America would be loop items of type Region; and Portugal, Germany, and Brazil would be loop items of type Country.
The columns of a loop source should be hierarchically organized, with the column on the left being the parent column of the column on the right. The same is true for the organization of the loop items.
This means that in our example Country is a child of Region, and therefore Portugal is a child of Europe.
In our example we could have two nested looping sections with the parent section iterating over Region and the child section iterating over Country, as seen in the following screenshot.
Filtering fields enable respondents to be prompted to answer only questions about particular entities in a loop source that are relevant to them.
A filtering field is associated with one loop item type of a given loop source. When a filtering field is created, the system will add an extra field to the profile of each respondent of that questionnaire, which can then be associated with the relevant loop item for that respondent.
Using the above example, if the filtering field was associated with the item type Country and the respondent had it set to Portugal, the respondent would not be prompted to fill in any questions about Germany.
The ORS allows the association of extra information with each loop item. The information to be associated can be a URL, a string of text or a link to an image.
In Figure 36 the Portuguese and German flags have been added as extra information for the respective loop items.