Limitations of Qualtrics API

Question

With respect to the Qualtrics API (v3) documentation (https://api.qualtrics.com/docs/overview) there does not appear to be any means to send a GET request through a REST client to get the individual survey responses for a specific survey (I suppose that the developers figured that no would be interested in decoupling the survey results from the admin panel).

The reason why I would like to be able to submit a GET request to get survey results is for real-time data visualization purposes that do not depend on me exporting the data every so often to re-update the visualization. If Qualtrics does not support such a GET request, which service (perhaps SurveyMonkey or its ilk) best facilitates what I'm trying to build? Or do I have to build an entire survey module from scratch? (shudders)

Answer 1

SurveyMonkey has a REST API that allows you to fetch all your responses.

You can fetch all your responses by doing:

GET /v3/surveys/<survey_id>/responses

Which will give you a skinny payload (usually IDs only, and maybe a name or title but not in this case).

You can then get a specific response by doing:

GET /v3/responses/<response_id>

You can also fetch all responses as fatter payloads by doing:

GET /v3/surveys/<survey_id>/responses/bulk

Or, depending on your use case, for example if you have some visualization that you want to update in real-time without polling for responses you can set up a webhook.

POST /v3/webhooks
{
    "name": "My Response Webhook",
    "event_type": "response_completed",
    "object_type": "survey",
    "object_ids": ["<survey_id1>", "<survey_id2>", ...],
    "subscription_url": "https://mycallback.url"
}

Where subscription_url is your callback url, and then whenever any new responses for the defined surveys come in you'll be notified to the subscription_url provided and you can then know to refresh your charts.

Answer 2

I have done that by getting contacts, in every contact there are object of Response history where you can get the information of a survey assigned to a respondents.

Answer 3

I agree that v3.0 has some big short comings. I have no idea what they are thinking. There should be a way to retrieve a specific response using Response ID.

You can still use v2.5 of the api to do what you want.