Activating a survey

Once you are happy with the structure of your survey you can activate it by clicking on the "Activate survey" icon. Activating a survey does a number of things:

• It creates a separate database table to hold all survey responses, and creates for each possible answer to the survey a field in that table.
• It allows people to enter data into that table, and gives you access to other features for the survey, including browse and token facilities.
• It gives you access to the "tokens" feature. Once a survey is activated, the "tokens" button will be available (see section on Tokens ).
• If your survey is set to "not anonymous", a tokens table will be created automatically.

Before you activate a survey you should note the following points:

• When the survey is initialized you can change the text for questions, answers, the survey etc, but not the type of question or the type of answer.
• You cannot add new questions or delete questions. Nor can you add answers to any of the array or multiple choice questions -  however you can add answers to the basic list type questions.
• If you deactivate (not expire) the survey, it will move the responses to a backup table and lose participation informations but you will again be able to add new questions and groups and to modify parameters.

If the "Activate survey" icon is not shown, then your survey is not yet capable of being activated (for example if you have no questions created yet). Once clicking on this icon, LimeSurvey will run a quick consistency check to make sure that your survey will work properly.