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The Forsta Survey Source reads responses from one or more surveys. Multiple surveys can be chosen either by selecting them from a list of surveys, or by setting a keyword filter. The keyword filter will match any survey that is assigned a particular category/keyword in the Project Overview page in Forsta.
Incremental Updates
The source supports incremental read mode. This means that only changed or new responses for a survey (since the rule was last executed) will be included in the buffer. The matching is based on the “last touched” column in the response control table. If this value is later than the last executed time for the rule (for this particular survey), then the response is included in the buffer.
Note: Incremental Updates are only applicable to recurring tasks - non-recurring tasks will include all data subject to the data filters on the Source tab.
Note: This setting will have no effect in a rule with the same source/target survey ids where Execution Mode is set to ‘Update Data’ because the previous execution of the rule will have updated the ‘last touched’ column and therefore on the next execution the records will be included again since their ‘last touched’ value is later than the previous execution of the rule.
Multi Source Surveys
When selecting multiple survey sources using the keyword filter, new surveys may be included that were not part of the source during the previous execution. For these new surveys, all responses will be read, even if the source is set to incremental read mode, as they will not have been synchronized before. The multiple-survey source will transfer data from one survey at a time. If a transfer for a survey fails, the task will be aborted.
Survey data will not be removed from the destination, even if the survey is removed from Forsta. The only way to remove the data is to clean the destination and to schedule a complete transfer of all sources.
Note: Executing the rule for Multi Source Survey transfers requires considerable resources and it will take a considerable time to run (in extreme cases several hours). In addition, Forsta cannot guarantee that Multi Source Surveys including more than 20 surveys will function correctly. Multi Source Survey transfers should therefore be limited to a maximum of 20 surveys.
Uncommitted Reads
In order to achieve maximum performance, the Forsta Source will read uncommitted data and will not use any transactional locking mechanisms.