Creating Custom items

[pallavi.chilappagari]

Hi all

Could you please tell me how to create custom items in MediaLab-i would like to make use of drop down lists and radio buttons in my application.

thanks in advance

pallavi

[jarvis24]

[update Nov 11, 2006: here is a link to the section on Cutom Items from the v2006 manual: www.empirisoft.com/medialab/help/custom_items.htm]

Custom items are way easier than they were in v2004. You create a web page using whatever program you like. If it shows up in Internet Explore then it will work fine. You can include any html form techniques you like for as many variables as you like. Just make sure your form uses "method=post"

List the item as a custom item in your questionnaire, indicating the name of the file in the filename field. MediaLab will present it and will intercept any posted data and save it to your data file so long as the posted variable name exists in your experiment somewhere as an item. If you have multiple variables in a single custom item, then just create extra custom items with the additional variable names needed.

I've posted a sample here that uses radio buttons. Let me know if you have any trouble with it.

Note this sample requires v2006.1.34 or later.

[pallavi.chilappagari]

Thank you very much.
best
pallavi

[jarvis24]

Here is a revision that shows you how to do multiple radio button questions on one page. It's essentially the same as just one. The big difference is that you now have more variable names. Normally, you would just have your MediaLab variable name match the HTML form variable name. Since you can't get away with this now, this is what you can do..

Create additional custom items in your questionnaire with the additional HTML form variable names you want to keep. If you do not include a filename for the items, then MediaLab will know they are just placeholders for additional variables. Check out the attached sample. It lists some extra custom items at the end that have no file names. But because the variable names are used in an HTML form, MediaLab will save the data when it's collected.

Remember these html forms can be edited easily in any text editor like the Windows notepad.exe editor.

[Aner]

I've succeeded running multiple radios and obtaining the data from each of the items. However, for the empty custom items in the questionnaire (the ones that stand there as dummies just to capture data on their variable name), medialab seems to force itself to display an html page (despite the fact I did not name a file!) - which leads to an error screen on the browser (no page available). How do I convince medialab to just use the added custom lines for data saving from the previous html file rather than trying to display additional custom items? Thanks!

[jarvis24]

May be a version issue. The feature that gets MediaLab to skip any custom item without a filename came in v2006.1.28. If you have a version that's prior to that, try installing the latest version from the download page.