This article covers these topics:

• The <timeout> element
• Display a timer
• Use cases

The <timeout> element

The <timeout> element can be used to specify actions that will be triggered when a defined timeout expires. The start time is the time at which the survey is first started. The timeout will be checked when the user taps the next button in a question; if more time has passed since the start of the survey, than the timeout duration, the target (action) will be invoked (triggered).

Timers are defined with the <timeout> tag.

Timeout examples

The first line in the following script causes the questionnaire to go to Q2 when more than 15 minutes have passed since the survey was started. The second line will end the survey and set the entry type to screened_out when more than 60 minutes have passed since the survey was started:

If several timeouts are defined with the same time attribute (e.g. multiple <timeout>s have time="60"), only the first one will be checked, and each subsequent timeout with the same time value will be ignored.

For example, if both <timeout>s in the above examples had time="60", the questionnaire would go to Q2.

If, when the respondent taps the next button, more than one timeout would be triggered (i.e. in last example, the respondent took 70 minutes to pass this question, which is >60 and >15), each timeout would be flagged as triggered but only the latest (with the highest value of the time-attribute) would be triggered (i.e. endsurvey(screenout) would run in this example).

Display a Timer

A survey timer can be used to display the timer in an info question. It displays the time left to invoke (or trigger) a target specified in the survey timeout element. Pausing or stopping a survey does not pause the timer - the timer will be counted from the time the survey was started. Adding an attribute "timer" to the info question XML can enable the survey timer.

Survey timer example

In the above code, the "timer" attribute has been set to value "15" (timer="15"). This value should match the value of the attribute time in the timeout element as shown below.

Use cases

Survey Timeout is the right tool for timed questionnaires/activities

If you want to make sure the panellist/user entry/answer is complete within two minutes, add this line to your script:

If you want to trigger a certain question/display an info screen after 2 minutes from the first one, add this line to you script:

You can stress the timed activity by showing the Survey Timer, say you want the activity to be completed within 5 minutes, you can start showing the Survey Timer counting down as follow: