Separate questionnaire data-files

[Thomas]

Hi Blair,
yet, I have not tried to read out the responses.xls from another programm (because this task seems to be a tough nut to crack), but I found another way to get ML responses as stimuli in DRT. I'm(not yet) firm with C++, I used php, webbrower and server.


Ok, here we go (ML/DRT V.2006, I had no time to try the 2008 versions):

I made html-pages (strictly speaking: *.php, it's an html with php-scripts, but it seems that the server needs the php-file ending to parse the php code well) with html-formulas and use php-scripts to write the responses to a separate textfile. Afterwards, I use a short php-page to do the calculations and write the responses to another textfile which is located in the stim-folder of the experiment so that DRT can read it. In ML, I address the pages within the browser "outside" of Medialab, so data is tracked by php and not by ML. Unfortunately, if I use the HMTL-item type ML wants a file and not an url (I guess there is also a thread here about this topic), and php is only parsed if I call the php-files via a web-browser (because, of course, I need a server to parse the php commands, so my php and html-files are located in the htdocs of the server), e.g.via a short pipefile within ML as a command-parameter.
This works very well because now I can "dictate" how the data is recorded and this makes it much easier to read it out afterwards (especially if DRT wants to read it out).
And, to put it a step further, this procedure can not only generate stim-lists for DRT, but also complete DRT-csv-input-files, and I guess this is the "big-party-feature" of this approach (e.g. if you want to do a lexical decision task and want to match control words with unknown stimulus words according to the word length).
I managed it to get the stuff run in three days using the online-tutorials, so, this may also be no problem for anyone other.

Best, Tom

P.S. I forgot to mention that, according to the parameter which you use to write the data-file, the information is may be overwritten. normally I use a short batchfile to copy the datafiles to another folder, or I simply tell my student research assistants who run the experiment to save the files by hand and rename it with the participant-number.