Close Survey

Close Survey

Closing a survey

To close (end) a survey, you can either "expire" or "deactivate" it.

Important.png  Attention: We strongly recommend using the expiry option to close a survey. The reasons are stated below.

Expiry

You can manually expire the survey by setting an expiry date/time.  From the Settings tab, select Publication & access control settings and set an Expiry date/time:



Alternatively, when deactivating the survey (by clicking the Stop this survey button), an option to expire the survey is provided.





Note:  Please refer to the survey management section for steps on deactivating a survey.

Pros of choosing the expiry option

If you decide to expire your survey:
  • No results are lost
  • No respondent information is lost
  • Change of questions, groups, and parameters is limited
  • An expired survey is not accessible to participants (they only see a message that the survey has expired)
  • It is possible to perform analysis using the Responses & Statistics functionality in LimeSurvey.

To make the survey available to your participants again, change or remove the expiration date from the Publication and access panel.

Help! I accidentally closed my survey - what now?

If you closed your survey accidentally, it is important that you do not change anything in your survey. To recover your data:
  1. Activate your survey again.
  2. Select Responses from the toolbar.
  3. Click Import and select the "Import answers from a deactivated survey table" menu entry.
  4. Choose your source table.
  5. Click Import located in the upper-right part of the screen.

Important.png Warning: You can import all of the old responses that are compatible with your current survey. Compatibility is determined by comparing column types and names, the ID field being always ignored. Using type coercion may cause serious issues with your data; use it with care or not at all if possible.
Currently, LimeSurvey detects and handles the following changes:
  • Question is moved to another group (result is imported correctly).
  • Question is removed from target (result is ignored).
  • Question is added to target (result is set to database default value).

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