Panel Attributes

🗄️ What are panel attributes ?

Panel attributes are the basics of a panel as it will define the structure of the panelist inside our panel and thus the data we can collect, manage and use. The panel attributes editor allows us to add / delete attributes to our panel.

📚 Panel attributes types

Panel attributes can be categorized into 2 categories.

• Internal attributes are independent from any connector and can be added manually to a panel. Creation / deletion, update of data inside these kind of attributes will have no effect on any third party data source.

Internal attributes are not supported in the approval entry process which means that once an attribute value for a panelist has been updated by a respondent its change will be immediately saved the database even if a panel connector requires an approval.

• Linked attributes are linked to a panel connector data source and cannot be added manually. These attributes are generated automatically by the panel connector to reflect the structure to which the panel is connected to. If the connector is supporting live update of its data source all value changes made from within ngSurvey will be updated both in the local ngSurvey database and also in the remote connected data store. The answer type defined for the attribute is defined by the panel connector it is however possible to change manually the answer type that is currently assigned to a linked attribute, but its not possible for validation reasons to change its entry validation settings as this would maybe break the update / add process to the connected third party data store.

In case of the SQL server panel connector each column of the connected SQL table will be defined as a linked attribute.

Both types of attributes can be mixed together. For example if we use a connector that connects us to a third party data source but we are missing some key information that is not available in this data source we can add internal attributes to our linked attributes to collect that additional data.