How To Work with QRef’s & Short ID’s

Working with QRef’s and Short ID’s is one of the most basic methods for keeping your survey organized, readable and correctly indexed.
Those methods are easy to use and will help preventing scripting errors that might be caused.

QRef
Let’s say for example that we have the following script written somewhere in our survey:
Answer(15)==1
If we add\remove more questions\chapters or move questions places, that scripts index might not index any more to the right question.
Therefore QRef
method should be used.
For example:
Answer(QRef(15))==1
If the script is written like that, no matter what changes will be made, the index will follow the correct question it was indexed on.
In conclusion, getting used to add QRef’s regularly is easy, quick and saves a lot of time in case of index errors.

Short ID’s
In order to index our questions in the most elegant way; we have the Short ID method.
If you go to the survey properties tab and check the ‘ShortID as Question Index’ & ‘Show Question Index’:

Then, if you go to the variables tab of a question, you can choose its ID:

And when the survey will run, it will appear like that:

This is an easy, quick and elegant way to organize all your questions with their index’s.

Using Short ID's as a basis for variables

Another more complex feature for using Short ID's is for Tracker surveys, for example:
If you have a track survey that each variable name must stay with the exact name, on each round, you would might want to look at this feature:

In the survey properties you can set it on:

The thing it does, is that Answer\Topic variables get the short ID as a base to their names, preventing these variables of being changed in case of adding or deletion of questions.
For example, if I have a Multiple Selection question , that is indexed 1, and it's answers are:

A_1_1

A_1_2

If I add another question right before it, these variables will change to:
A_2_1

A_2_1

This might be problematic for Tracker surveys, if I had this feature on, my variables would have be fixed to the short ID I have configured, preventing it from changing:

That’s it !