Offline Surveys, is it possible to link out

Question

We are designing a study that will be administered in person and while the tablets will have cellular connections, we are told that they are unstable and our vendor would prefer to run the study using the Offline Surveys app.

Problem is, the term page triggers an auto-email and/or SMS (yeah, we got that working).  It works just fine when online, but I get a Sawtooth Error 132 on the Offline Surveys app.  Is there any workaround?

Comments

You're linking to another website while lacking an internet connection?  Is the goal to have the email-sending code not run on Offline Surveys at all?

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I'm wondering if there is a way for the emails to be sent when Offline Surveys finally gets internet and connects to the Sawtooth Server.  So storing data locally that triggers an email/sms send upon hitting your servers.  

I apologize this isn't totally clear, perhaps some context will help.

The survey will be done in two parts:
1) A  short form: 5-7 questions then gather contact information.
2) After finishing the short form respondents will receive an email or SMS with a link to the full survey. In the ideal world everything is one survey so it all ends up in the same data file with the same respondentID.

If we can't get something to work with Offline Surveys then we'll probably just get a cellular connection and do the short form online using the tablet's browser as that sends emails/sms just fine.  

So, then the question becomes generating a link that will pass respondents to a specific question in the survey, and keeping the same respondentID.

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I'm not an SMTP expert by a long shot, but my guess is that there isn't going to be a change that can be made to the unverified Perl in your survey to handle this.  Even if the code could be made "patient," the process running the survey code is likely killed when the survey is finished and certainly killed if the application is closed / the device restarts.  I think you'd need the server (admin module) to be set up to fire off the emails when it receives new respondents.  This is probably possible, but would require modifying the .pl files significantly.

Would it be practical to tell respondents that they'll receive an email within some timespan, then use some other executable code that looks at the responses in the admin module and sends off the emails?