[WorkyMcWorkerson]

Hi everyone,

I'm posting to this forum because my boss asked me to take on more programming work, and I need some help from people who have more experience with languages and scripts than I do. After giving this board a quick perusal, I figured I'd go ahead and ask my question.

My boss is curious if a script exists that makes it possible for triggers to "grab" specific data and transform it (in particular, perl or php). For instance, whenever someone completes one of our company's online assessments, we get an e-mail that tells us what the client reported, how long it took them to complete the questionnaire, so on and so forth. What we want to do is be able to set up a trigger that collects the answer to one question, aggregates it over a period of time (say, a week), and then transforms it into a graph or chart. (i.e., Let's say Timmy has to report his behavior on a daily basis. Of the 25 questions on the report, we're most curious about No. 10, which has to do with anger. We want to be able to get data from that question and that question only). Our current assessment software gives us a global assessment of functioning, but not a micro view.

Anyone got any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[bizzar528]

That's tough to find something that specific with that general of a request. Your probably gonna have to make something custom.

How are you storing your data? Depending on how you store results will determine how you parse and sort your data. If it's in the emails, then your going to have a rough time, but if your dumping to a database, you could pull all of Timmy's answers over time, and parse for that one field, then do a quick graph or export the data to something else that does do graphing.

Here's a swf package that uses php to graph results.
http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php

[WorkyMcWorkerson]

We do not have our own database. Yesterday I spent the entire day drafting the work breakdown schedule in order to achieve results the boss wants, and I most definitely said we needed our own, separate database for the purposes of aggregating data and parsing e-mails (something like MySQL, etc). Right now the information from the assessments is stored in a 3rd party database, and we receive e-mail results whenever a responder completes a survey. I don't think the 3rd party will be able to give us backlogs of data, either. I'm getting the sense that we'll have to build this from the ground up, which, as you said, will be "rough."

Will the link you provided still be of use to me if I have to create something custom? And if I have to go down the path of creating something from scratch (in PHP, I suppose), is this forum a good place to get answers for further inquiries?