Update created questionnaire • shiny.quetzio

There may be some conditions under which you would like to update rendered questionnaire. Currently shiny.quetzio supports two of these updates:

update of selected values (Quetzio_value_update)
update of item labels (Quetzio_label_update)

In this vignette the usage of these features for Quetzio objects will be described in further detail.

This vignette assumes that the reader already knows how to create a questionnaire with shiny.quetzio. Otherwise, please get this information from ‘Create a questionnaire’ vignette.

Update of selected values

I think this feature can be most beneficial in two distinct situations and provide option to make your questionnaire more user-friendly:

You have one questionnaire available standalone, but it is also a part of some linked questionnaires. User should be allowed to update the values of linked one on the base of the standalone.
Your shinyApp allows users to store some of their data in the external database, and it can be retrieved in another session by them (eg. after logging in in some matter). In this case user should be allowed to update some of the values of the questionnaire with these.

Let’s assume the values used in update are gathered from some questionnaire made with shiny.quetzio, eg. some demographic data:

using the source yaml:

gender:
  label: Which gender are you identyfing as?
  type: selectizeInput
  mandatory: true
  choiceNames:
    - Male
    - Female
    - I identify as neither of above
    - Prefer not to say
  choiceValues:
    - M
    - F
    - O
    - NI
age:
  label: What is your age?
  type: numericInput
  mandatory: true
  min: 15
  step: 1
  placeholder: Provide integer number of years

and code for questionnaire generation:

demo_quetzio <- Quetzio_create(
  source_method = "yaml",
  source_yaml = "path/to/yaml/file.yaml",
  module_id = "demographic_quetzio"
)

If you create afterwards a more complicated questionnaire, which will contain items gender and age too, you can allow user to update this items with value provided in demo_quetzio. In the example below, if the user completed questionnaire assigned to demo_quetzio, which contained items named the same as some items in complex_quetzio, after triggering the observeEvent the values will be filled.

# input$update is some kind of 'actionButton' to trigger the update

observeEvent(input$update, {
  # call the function specifying  more complicated questionnaire,
  # in this example it is assigned to 'complex_quetzio'
  Quetzio_value_update(
    Quetzio = complex_quetzio,
    # 'values' need to be static list, therefore parenthesis are needed
    # as the 'demo_quetzio$answers' is reactiveVal object
    values = demo_quetzio$answers()
    )
})

You can also use the list populated externally of questionnaire created by shiny.quetzio

values_to_update <- list(gender = "M",
                         age = 28)

observeEvent(input$update, {
  Quetzio_value_update(
    Quetzio = complex_quetzio,
    values = values_to_update
  )
})

Update of item labels

There are some situations, when you would like to have different item labels shown to different questionee based on some prior behaviour inside the app.

One of more frequent reasons for that - especially in languages with distinct grammatical genders - is to present questionee a version of item aligned to the gender that the questionee identifies with.
Reactive label updating can also be handy if the questionnaire is a part of experiment, and you want them to be different between varying experimental groups.

Let’s suppose, that we want to create a questionnaire, in which the questionee is asked to describe themselves from the perspective of the third person. In the source file for created questionnaires we will then include the ‘default’, gender-neutral noun them.

test1:
  type: textInput
  mandatory: true
  label: What adjective would be most accurate to describe them?
  placeholder: One adjective
  width: 500px
test2:
  type: radioButtons
  label: What is your opinion of they?
  mandatory: true
  choices:
    - Goob
    - Neutral
    - Bad
  maxItems: 1
test3:
  type: selectizeInput
  label: What are their favourite days in the week? (max three)
  mandatory: true
  choices:
    - Monday
    - Tuesday
    - Wednesday
    - Thursday
    - Friday
    - Saturday
    - Sunday
  maxItems: 3

We can create a select input somewhere in our shinyApps UI, that will be asking questionee about the gender they are identifying with:

selectizeInput(
  "gender",
  "Which gender are you identyfing as?",
  choiceNames = c("Male", "Female", 
                  "I identify as neither of above", "Prefer not to say"),
  choiceValues = c("M", "F", "O", "NI"),
  # to make no initial selection
  selected = character(0),
  multiple = T,
  options = list(maxItems = 1)
)

We need to create additional source file telling the Quetzio which label should be presented for every value of the variable it should be reacting to. Source file can be created as a R object (data.frame or list), YAML file or a googlesheet sheet. For clarity in this vignette YAML will be presented:

test1:
   M: What adjective would be most accurate to describe him?
   F: What adjective would be most accurate to describe her?
test2:
   M: What is your opinion of him?
   F: What is your opinion of her?
test3:
   M: What are his favourite days in the week? (max three)
   F: What are her favourite days in the week? (max three)

If the reactive passed as a trigger contains value not represented in the label update source, then the default labels will be shown.

When everything is set, we can then create our questionnaire and its reactivity within the server. It can be done by utilizing the function Quetzio_label_update()

# define the questionnaire which will have reactive labels
questionnaire <- Quetzio_create(
  source_method = "yaml",
  source_yaml = "path/to/main/source.yaml",
  module_id = "quetzio_to_react"
)

# update_labels() method takes a reactive as a trigger, so we need to
# pass the input value accordingly
gender_react <- reactive(input$gender)

# call the function passing your Quetzio object and reactive as a trigger
Quetzio_label_update(
  Quetzio = questionnaire,
  trigger = gender_react, # reactive needs to be passed without parentheses!
  source_method = "yaml",
  source_yaml = "path/to/label/source.yaml"
)

You can also use answer from another questionnaire - we can utilize the demographic questionnaire created above. Be aware, that the answers are present within the Quetzio$answers() only after the questionnaire submission!

gender_react <- reactive(
  demo_quetzio$answers()$gender
)

Quetzio_label_update(
  Quetzio = questionnaire,
  trigger = gender_react, # reactive need to be passed without parentheses!
  source_method = "yaml",
  source_yaml = "path/to/label/source.yaml"
)