problems with redirect() function - the redirect didn't occur, and the questionnaire just went on.

Question

Dear SoSci Support,

I am currently piloting my questionnaire, and after 10 test sessions in which everything worked alright, I had one pilot for whom the redirect command did not execute as intended.

Namely, the redirect command is specified as following:

redirect('http://urlToMyWebpage/?tk=�seToken%&num=�seNumber%', true);

This is the only command on this page. This usually takes participants to my website so they do a 15 minute task, after which they are sent back to sosci survey to complete a questionnaire session.

Today, however, I had one pilot participant for whom the redirect did not execute, and instead, they were brought to the same page and had continued with the questionnaire session.

Do you know what the reason behind this may be?

Could you please help me prevent this from happening and make sure if the redirect command doesn't work, that they still redirect manually. Also it would be great if we could prevent them to be able to continue with the questionnaire unless they get sent back to it from my website.

Thank you very much for your help!

Best,
Milan

Answer 1

The true in redirect() explicitly allows the interview to be continued when coming back from the "other" site, see redirect().

Therefore the most likely explanation would be that the "other" site sent the respondent back immediately. Did you check the webserver logfiles from the "other" site for whether the respondent got there?

In your question, there seem to be some problematic characters in the URL, but I guess that happend during copying the PHP code.

// This is shown in your question
redirect('http://urlToMyWebpage/?tk=�seToken%&num=�seNumber%', true);
// This is what it should look like
redirect('http://urlToMyWebpage/?tk=caseToken%&num=caseNumber%', true);

Comments

Hi, thanks for the quick answer. Yes, you were right about the weird characters in the hyperlink - that just happened when copying php code onto this forum.

I checked the other site, and there is no trace of entry. I suspect that when for whatever reason the redirect didn't work, the subject might have refreshed their browser to the same URL they had been doing the survey on.

Is there any way to generate a different come-back link? For instance a come-back link that specifies the page in the questionnaire to which the participant should come back to?
Then I could make that page inaccessible otherwise.
After the redirect page I would put an extra page were I hide the next button, and spell out the URL to the task, so that if this happens again, they can try to click on the link or paste it in their browser.
Would this be possible?

Thank you for your support!

Kind regards,
Milan

---

You could add any parameter to the back-link (e.g., https://www.soscisurvey.de/EXAMPLE/?i=[token]&x=y) and read this "request variable" x with a question of type "Device and Request Variables". Then you can test if it's value is "y" and if not, you can use goToPage() to redirect to the previous page. Or you could display a text ("that did not work") and use setNextPage() to continue to the previous page after "next".