Find and Replace
The Survey Designer’s Find and Replace feature can find and replace text in any of the following items:
- Question prompts
- Response options
- Text/HTML items
- Data dictionary descriptions
- Variable references
By default, Find and Replace operates on the entire survey. Find and replace can be limited to a single item or to a group of items by selecting the item(s) in the survey designer before choosing Find and Replace… from the Edit menu.
To choose a single item for find and replace, simply click on the name of the item in the Survey Designer. To choose multiple items, hold the Control key and click each item individually. Holding the Shift key while you click selects every item between the item you are clicking on and the last selected item.
Using Find and Replace
To find and/or replace all instances of a word throughout a survey, follow these steps:
- Choose Edit / Find and Replace…
- Type the word to find into the Find field.
- To replace the word, type the replacement word into the Replace with field.
- Click Find Next to find the next occurrence of the word. Click Replace to replace the next occurrence of the word. Click Replace All to replace all occurrences of the word throughout the survey.
Find Next and Replace display the next result of the word search in the HTML editor, allowing a chance to review the text before deciding to make a replacement. To replace the highlighted word, click Replace again to make the replacement.
Clicking Replace All will replace all instances of a word within the survey without asking to confirm. Illume simply reports the number of occurrences replaced when the operation is complete. The Replace All operation cannot be undone.
The Start Over button begins a new search from the beginning of the survey document.
Search Scope
By default, find and replace operates on the entire survey. If one or more survey items have been selected before starting Find and Replace, only the Selected Items will be checked if the ” Selected items only” option to limit the operation has been checked.
When working within a group of selected items, checking Include items within selected collections will extend the find and replace operation into each of the collections that you have selected.
Search Options
- When Match Case is checked, Illume will perform a case-sensitive search in which upper- and lower-case letters must match exactly. E.g. A search for “Washington” will not find the word “washington” when Match Case is checked.
- When Match whole word is checked, your search will match whole words only. E.g. A search for “was” will match only the word “was” when this box is checked; otherwise, the search will match words like “Washington” that simply contain the letters “was” in succession.
- When Include variable references is checked, Illume will replace piping references. You should generally avoid this option unless you have a specific need like the one described under Replacing Variable References below.
- When Include item descriptions is checked, Illume will find and replace text within the data dictionary descriptions of questions and question tables. This is the text that appears on the Description tab of the question editor and in the description field of each item in the data dictionary.
Replacing Variable References
The Include variable references is useful in surveys that include near-identical collections of questions.
For example, the survey may ask the same 10 questions about a participant’s mother and father. The easiest way to build this survey would be to create a collection of the 10 “mother” questions first, and then to copy that entire collection and name the copy “father.”
When copying the collection, Illume asks to rename each of the questions. In this example, the question names may change from “AGE_MOTHER,” “OCCUPATION_MOTHER,” etc. to “AGE_FATHER,” “OCCUPATION_FATHER,” etc. There may be several places in the original collection that pipe data from reponses to previous questions. The piping might look like this:
How many years has your mother been working as a {OCCUPATION_MOTHER:Response}?
In the collection of questions about the father, you would obviously want the reference in the new collection to look like this:
How many years has your father been working as a {OCCUPATION_FATHER:Response}?
Running Find and Replace with the Include variable references option checked will make this replacement.
Undoing Find and Replace
To undo a find and replace operation:
- Click Done to close the Find and Replace dialog if it is not already closed.
- Right click in the right pane of the Survey Editor and choose Undo Find and Replace from the context menu.
The Revert to Saved button at the bottom of the Find and Replace dialog undoes changes to the text currently being displayed in the HTML editor.