Setting a simple conditional showing question to not be required

[kweav]

Description

Background

I'm building a survey with surveydown that has two types of conditional logic. 1) conditional page showing and 2) simple conditional showing for questions. After working with the surveydown template for conditional logic, I've seen that any question that is involved in driving conditional logic is by default required. This works well for my survey for conditional questions that show pages based on the answer selected, but I'd prefer if I could change this behavior for simple conditional questions that show a textbox. For example, on a demographics page I ask the respondent to specify their current role (and "Other" is an option). If they select "Other," I want to show a question/text box that lets them describe what "Other" is. However, I don't want this role question to be a required question.

Behavior I'd like to have

So the behavior I want is for respondents to be able navigate to the next page whether they answer the "role" question or not. If they do answer (and don't select "Other"), don't show the text box question that lets them specify what "Other" means. If they answer the "role" question and select "Other", show the text box that lets them specify what "Other" means.

What I've tried

I thought I might be able to force this by using sd_is_answered within the sd_show_if part of app.R, such that if the question is answered and the response is other, then go ahead and show a question that asks the respondent to specify other.

sd_show_if(
    # Simple conditional showing (for responses of Other)
    sd_is_answered("role") & input$role == "other" ~ "role_other",
)

But using this has the same behavior as if I only checked the response for the role question.

I also tried wrapping logic around sd_show_if that checks if the role question is answered and then specifies the show if logic. But then I got an error about using sd_is_answered incorrectly

if (sd_is_answered("role")){
    sd_show_if(

    # Simple conditional showing (for responses of Other)
    input$role == "other" ~ "role_other"
    )
}

Error in .getReactiveEnvironment()$currentContext() :
Operation not allowed without an active reactive context.
• You tried to do something that can only be done from inside a reactive consumer

Summarized question

Is it possible to not force-require questions whose responses are checked (in logic flows) to decide whether or not to show additional/related questions?

Additional information

Surveydown version:

> utils::packageDescription('surveydown')$Version
[1] "0.13.2"

Operating system: MacOS 15.6.1

Thank you for this package! It's very intuitive and useful and I'm so excited that our group's surveys are going to be version controlled

[jhelvy]

Hi @kweav, thanks for trying out surveydown!

We actually just made a decision very recently in v0.13.2 to auto-require any question involved in any of the conditional logic functions (see here). This is a hard-coded decision because without it, the logic can break.

In your use case, I agree this is probably more of an annoyance, but without it things internally can go awry. Would it work to just include the "other" question (in your example) and always have it visible (and not required)?

[kweav]

@jhelvy I understand. It should work to just include the "other" question and always have it visible, so I'll go with that.

I assumed that "auto-assigned" and "default" meant that it was behavior that could be changed especially since the example in the documentation doesn't mark the question as required (https://surveydown.org/docs/conditional-logic#showing-questions), but it's probably from the previous version then :)

Thank you for the quick response!

[jhelvy]

Ah, yes that is a screen grab from an earlier version. We'll have to update it.

For a bit more context as to why we have this requirement, imagine if the trigger question that controls some conditional logic was on a previous page. In that case, if the trigger question was not required, the respondent could proceed in the survey, but then the survey might break on the next page. This is the concern we had. If everything is on the same page, then it's not really much of an issue. Perhaps we could modify the logic to not force requirement if everything is on the same page. It's something to consider.

[kweav]

Thanks for the added context -- I did see that issue/resolution. It would be really nice if you could modify the logic to not force requirement if everything is on the same page.