REST API: How to retrieve the interview data of a survey

Overview

SurveyToGo provides a REST API that allows you to access survey data programmatically.

This article demonstrates a common use case: using the REST API to retrieve interviews for a specific survey.

You can customize the example code to meet your specific requirements. For example, you can:

• Specify the Survey ID for the survey you want to retrieve data from.

• Adjust the available filtering parameters to retrieve only the subset of interviews you need.

This allows you to tailor the API request to your survey and data retrieval requirements.

 

Using the REST API To Retrieve Interview Data

The primary REST API functions used to retrieve interview data are SurveyInterviewIDs and SurveyInterviewData.

The recommended process is:

1. Use SurveyInterviewIDs to retrieve a list of interview IDs that match your specified search criteria.

2. Use SurveyInterviewData to retrieve the actual XML data for those interview IDs.

Please note: The SurveyInterviewData function accepts a maximum of 99 interview IDs per request.

For better performance, we recommend retrieving interview data in batches of up to 99 IDs rather than making a separate request for each interview. This can significantly reduce the number of API calls and improve the overall retrieval speed.

The following C# example demonstrates how to:

• Call SurveyInterviewIDs to retrieve the relevant interview IDs.

• Divide the returned IDs into batches of up to 99.

• Call SurveyInterviewData for each batch to retrieve the interview data.

 

private bool TraverseInterviewData() {

//------------------------------------------- // Setting the parameters for the calls //-------------------------------------------

string surveyID = "XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX";

string username = "RESTAPIKEY/Username"; string password = "password"; //------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // STEP 1: Call SurveyInterviewIDs to get the interview ids of the survey (JSON format) //------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ string urlInterviewIds = string.Format( "https://api.dooblo.net/newapi/SurveyInterviewIDs?surveyIDs={0}", surveyID );

RestClient client = new RestClient(urlInterviewIds); client.Authenticator = new HttpBasicAuthenticator(username, password); RestRequest request = new RestRequest();

request.Method = Method.GET; client.AddDefaultHeader("Accept", "application/json");

client.AddDefaultHeader("Accept-Charset", "utf-8");

RestResponse resp = client.Execute(request);

List<int> interviewIds = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<int>>(resp.Content);

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // STEP 2: Group interview IDs into groups of 99 interviews, then call the // SurveyinterviewData for each pack of 99 interviews to get the XML Data // Note that the SurveyInterviewData only returns XML data, no JSON //------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ int counter = 0; string interviewIdsInCurPack = string.Empty;

for (int i=0; i<interviewIds.Count; i++) { interviewIdsInCurPack = string.Format("{0},{1}",interviewIdsInCurPack,interviewIds[i]); counter +=1;

bool lastInterviewID = i==interviewIds.Count-1;

if (counter == 99 || lastInterviewID) { interviewIdsInCurPack = interviewIdsInCurPack.Remove(0,1);

string urlInterviewData = string.Format( "https://api.dooblo.net/newapi/SurveyInterviewData?subjectIDs={0}&surveyID={1}&onlyHeaders=false&includeNulls=false", interviewIdsInCurPack, surveyID );

client = new RestClient(urlInterviewData); client.Authenticator = new HttpBasicAuthenticator(username, password); request = new RestRequest();

request.Method = Method.GET; client.AddDefaultHeader("Accept", "text/xml");

client.AddDefaultHeader("Accept-Charset", "utf-8"); resp = client.Execute(request);

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // STEP 3: This is the actual XML Data as it comes as an answer, your code should // process xmlInterviewData to process the interview data of the 99 interviews of // this pack //------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ string xmlInterviewData = resp.Content.ToString(); ...... ...... ...... counter = 0; interviewIdsInCurPack = string.Empty; }

if (lastInterviewID) { break; } } return true; }