Define a "form definition format" and a "answer format"

[jernst]

This would become more powerful in a variety of ways if there weren't "just" some code doing forms, and possibly an API, but a file format for the question side of things, and file format for answers.

(I haven't checked how you internally store forms and their answers ... perhaps it can be reused?)

It could be, say, XML, looking something like:

<survey>
 <question id="1">
  <text lang="en-US">What's your favorite color?</text>
  <enumeratedtype>
   <enum>red</enum>
...

The corresponding answers would reference the question via id attributes.

This would be more powerful because:

• questionnaires could be version-controlled, copied, edited without editing the running survey at the same time
• answers could be automatically processed in various ways, from integration into statistic analysis to, say, pretty-print the results in HTML or such ... and anybody could do that outside of having to change the app's code base (think Jupyter notebook or such)
• ...

There is some related work: http://www.aise.ics.saitama-u.ac.jp/cheng-lab/QSL/QSLSpecification_v3.1.pdf although it seems more complex than necessary for this.

[skjnldsv]

I think that would only make sense if other apps would support it? I'm not sure this is that interesting of a feature. We could keep this, but I doubt there will be much demand for it :) cc @jancborchardtx

[jernst]

Somebody always needs to be the first to establish a new format :-) Might as well be somebody like Nextcloud who isn't going to use this to drive users into a proprietary SaaS thing, and turns surveys into something more open than it currently is (Google forms, Surveymonkey etc).

Actually I would use it for some other things.