The following steps will introduce you to the ‘Filter Answer by Answers’ method, which is built within our function libraries.

Using this function, you can filter a questions answers according to an-other question’s answers, making the questions answers adjust according to your needs.

 

Use Case

For example, let’s say we have the following ‘Multi-Selection’ questions with the same scale of answers:

1. "Which of these TV stations did you watch in the last year?"

2. "Which of these TV stations did you watch in the past 6 months?"

3. "Which of these TV stations did you watch in the past month?"

Filters Needed: 

• Answers which were not chosen in question 1 will not appear in question 2.
• Answers that were not chosen in question 1 and question 2 will not appear in question 3.

Steps
Let’s create a few multi-selection questions:

For this example, we willo use the same answer scale in all of them:

• Answers that were not chosen in question 1 to not appear in question 2.
• Only the Answers that were answered in Q6 will be displayed in Q7:

Add the following code to the question's Start Script to filter its answers based on the answers selected in another question:

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, Q6);

In this example, Q6 is the variable name of the source question whose selected answers will be used for filtering.

Note: Questions can be referenced either by their variable name (recommended) or by their question index.

When this script runs, only the answers that were selected in Q6 will be displayed in the current question.

Showing Answers That Were Not Selected

If you want to display the answers that were not selected in the source question, use the inverse filtering option in the Start Script of the question being filtered.

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues,false,Q6);

Note: Setting the function's parameter to true produces the same behavior as the default version of the function described previously.

For example, if you configure the filter to exclude selected answers, any answers chosen in Q6 will be hidden in Q7.

Filtering Based on Multiple Questions

You can also filter a question's answers using selections made in multiple source questions.

For example, to filter the answers in Q8 based on the answers selected in both Q6 and Q7, add the following code to the Start Script of Q8:

 

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, Q6, Q7);

This function will use the answers selected in both source questions when determining which answers should be displayed in Q8.

 

Best Practices

In some cases, you may need to apply multiple filtering rules to the same question. When this happens, the filters should be applied in stages so that each filter builds on the previous one.

Example

Suppose Q6, Q7, and Q8 all use the same answer list.

The required filtering logic for Q8 is:

• Show only the answers selected in Q6.

• From those answers, hide any answers selected in Q7.

Add the filtering logic to the Start Script of Q8.

Step 1: Show Only Answers Selected in Q6

Use the following script:

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, Q6);

This displays only the answers that were selected in Q6.

Step 2: Hide Answers Selected in Q7

You might expect to use the following function:

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, false, Q7);

However, this will reset the first filter. It tells the system to hide the answers selected in Q7 and show all other answers. As a result, answers that were hidden by the first filter because they were not selected in Q6 may become visible again.

To avoid resetting the previous filter, use the third overload of the function:

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, false, false, Q7);

This hides the answers selected in Q7 while preserving the filter already applied from Q6.

Final Script

FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, Q6);
FilterAnswersByAnswers(CurrQues, false, false, Q7);

This ensures that Q8 displays only answers selected in Q6, excluding any answers also selected in Q7.

 

The extra “false” parameter (the third parameter sent to this function) is the “Reset” parameter. “False” means not to reset previous answers filtering, if made. So, in this case, an answer that was hidden after the first filtering call (because it was not chosen in AWARE) will stay hidden after the second filtering call as we wish.