Adding fields to surveys

You add fields in a survey to gather information from survey recipients to complete actions based on user responses such as updating records or fulfilling offering requests.

The process for adding fields to surveys is as follows:

• You create a workflow
• You add a Decision block to the workflow to complete actions based on user responses.
• You add workflow variables
• You use the workflow variables to add fields to the survey

You then add additional workflow actions to handle the survey responses. For example, if the survey is for a request offering, you add blocks for follow-up actions depending on whether you approve or reject the requests such as notifying users that their requests were approved or rejected.    

Depending on the information that you want to retrieve from survey recipients, you can choose different types of variables to add as fields to the surveys. 

The data types are as follows:

• Short Text.  The max length is 255 characters.
• Long Text. The max length is 10,000 characters.
• Numeric. The max length is 19 digits or 19 digits plus the minus (-) symbol.
• Decimal. The max length is 11 characters including the decimal separator. As subtype, you can select General or Decimal ($). Select general if you want to pair the field with a field that allows users to select a currency. 
• DateTime. The options are date and time, date only, and local date. 
• Checkbox.
• System and custom objects.

If you select short text, you can create a dropdown list to make it easier for survey recipients to select an option. You can add up to 20 options.

If you select an object you can limit the number of options that can be selected in the dropdown list:

• By using a saved search
• By creating dependent dropdown lists

For example, in a request offering for laptops, you want to make high-spec laptops only available to members of the IT department and low-spec laptops available to members of the sales department.

In this scenario, you can create a dependent dropdown list so that when survey recipients select a department, they can only select the offerings that are made available to their department. 

Related articles

Tutorial: Creating a dependency dropdown list in surveys. In this tutorial, you use two custom objects to create the dependency dropdown list in the survey.