data generation and free format (date)

Question

Hi,

I'm actually working on a process for my company and we would like to generate respondents to check if everything works well when our true respondent will go on the survey.

I'm trying to generate locally to avoid server lag and get faster generation, and I'm using the "use brower" option to test our javascript on the page.


But I encounter some problems.
First I try to generate a random date in the free format that we create.
I'm using a simple Regex in the data Genration "defined values" to start

Regex("[0-3][0-9]\/[0-1][0-9]\/[1-2][0-9][0-9][0-9]")

.

Each time the generator have to answer this question i got the following error:
"Respondent XX encountered a logic error - Encountered error on 'nameQuestion' - The server returned the following error message: An Error occured processing your API request the post value for submitted_answers could not be evaluated. This is likely a formatting error."

How can I fix it ? Is there something that I don't understand?

The second point is that each time there is a custom javascript that block the answer because incorrect or don't respect our consistency, the generator just stop the generation and wait someone click on play. Can we avoid that and ask to retry to generate the page until he can go to the next one?

Thanks a lot if you have some answers
I remain at your disposal for any additional information

Comments

As a heads up, the regex can produce funny looking dates like "00/19/2000."  It sounds like your survey may be refusing such an answer because it is not a valid date.  This regular expression may suit your needs better:

Regex("(0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[0-1])\/(0[1-9]|1[0-2])\/([12][0-9]{3})")

This Debuggex link will offer you a visualization of how this regex works and allow you to perform tests on the regex: https://www.debuggex.com/r/CgiZPOj_lIG8OGNP

Answer 1

I will need to investigate the first issue.  It is a possible bug.  "submitted_answers" is used to save the answers that have been submitted so far in the data generation for lookup.

If you don't mind sending your study files into support@sawtoothsoftware.com, I would be happy to look at the first issue.

Maybe this will become clear once I can see your study, but as for the second issue, are you using "Defined Values" for that question and the data generated response is not valid?

Thanks,
Jon

Comments

After reviewing the files, there is a bug in the data generator that prevents the fake respondents from proceeding when a question in a loop is encountered.  The fix will be in the next release of Lighthouse Studio.