Source of a breakdown field

Breakdown fields — unit, course, class, shift — are what allow grouping and filtering responses. They grant no access: they organize the reading.

The four sources

For each survey, you choose where each field's value comes from:

• Invitation — the value comes with the invitation: from the recipient spreadsheet, the integration or the registry. It is the most reliable.
• Answer — the value comes from a question the respondent answers in the form.
• Link — the value comes from the address used to answer, as in a named link per unit.
• Fixed — every response of the survey gets the same value.

Changing the source later

The source decides the value when the response is recorded. Old responses keep the value they received; new ones follow the new source. Changing the source in the middle of collection therefore makes the report group responses by different criteria depending on the date.

When the field points to a registry

In unit, class or registry fields (course, teacher), the response stores the item, not the text. That is why renaming a course updates the whole history, and the same course written two ways does not become two courses in the report.

With the answer source, the respondent declares the value. If the unit comes from the answer, it is the respondent who says which unit the response belongs to.