Methods of Integrating External Software into Blaise Surveys
Lilia Filippenko, Joseph Nofziger, Mai Nguyen & Roger Osborn; RTI International, USA
For surveys that require call to external application, there are a few ways to do the implementation. At RTI
International we have projects that:
use Manipula setups to manage switching between part of interview and calls to external application,
use Action from a Blaise instrument and BOI file to pass data between Blaise database and Access database,
use Alien routers from a Blaise instrument to call external application and collect data from them.
Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Although the alien routers look like the best solution, their
development and testing take more time than the first two approaches. We will present our experience with Alien
routers in our recent project. Our Blaise instrument calls a variety of external applications through alien routers
written in Visual Basic.Net, and C#.
The paper will discuss the following aspects of the integration:
application invocation,
data management,
graphical presentation,
complex randomization of questions.
| Contact: lfilippenko@rti.org |