iSalient naturally provides the ability to pre-fill survey fields with a default response. However, in certain cases, it would be nice to have a way to pre-select an alternate set of default responses.
iSalient provides the ability to accomplish this for the first page of your survey--however, advanced HTML skills are required to use this feature. In order to select alternate default answers, follow the steps below:
Deploy the survey and view page 1 of the survey as a respondent
View the HTML source of the survey page in your browser
Locate each question on the survey form within the HTML source, and note the name of the field. The field name will be in the form "form[12345]"
The next step is to append those variables along onto the end of your survey link.
To begin with, your survey link will look something like this: http://example.com/isalient/index.php?survey_code=79b22778&login=1
To this link, you need to first append the text: "&populate_incoming=1". This tells iSalient that you will be setting the default options for the first survey page manually.
Then, append each of the default answers in the format: &form[12345]=MyNewDefaultAnswer
Your final result will look like this: http://example.com/isalient/index.php?survey_code=79b22778&login=1&populate_incoming=1&form[12345]=MyNewDefaultAnswer
The important thing to remember here is that the populate_incoming option is all-or-nothing. If you are going to set any answers manually in this fashion, you must do so for all of them. Any questions you fail to assign values to in the survey link will simply not have any default answers.
There is currently no way to implement alternate default answers for any but the first page of your survey.
