APPENDIX

FILE EXTENSION DEFINITIONS

Survey Said uses the following file extensions when reading and writing data. Information contained in the files are:

File Extension            Data Contained within the file

.SDB

Created by the Question Librarian program. Contains the selected questions for a survey. Also contains optionally defined categories.

.RDB

Created by the Survey Respondent program. As respondents answer the survey, their NON-verbatim responses are added to the file. If Comments have been enabled for this survey, the respondents records contain pointers into the associated .TDB text file, which is also created.

.TDB

Created by the Question Librarian if either Open Ended questions have been selected or comments have been enabled for the survey created. It contains the respondents textual answers. This file should NOT be edited because the associated .SDB file contains pointers to each respondent's textual answer. Inserting or deleting a single character will corrupt all respondent's answers after the inserted or deleted character. The Survey Respondent program uses the .SDB file to read and display the selected questions for the associated survey. The Survey Respondent program saves respondent's NON-verbatim answers in the .RDB file along with pointers to any verbatim (text) answers it saved in the .TDB file.

.EXP

The default extension for export study data in an ASCII format.

Important: In a network environment, the survey files must be set to READ/WRITE for respondent access. These files include the; filename.SDB, filename.RDB and filename.TDB.