Missing question responses even though the respondent completed the survey

[vmigonesumma]

Description

First of all, thanks for the package! It's been really useful!

I have a survey app hosted on shinyapps.io that is connected to a PostgreSQL database on Railway.

Last week I encountered an unusual bug where I lost (or perhaps never received) the data for some—or in some cases all—of the survey questions, even though they are all required and the current_page column shows that the respondent reached the final page.

The strange thing is that I have some metadata: I see multiple rows with session_id, time_start, time_end, and the timestamp of the first page. The current_page still indicates the last page of the survey, and I have three values stored via the sd_store_value function, but none of the actual question responses nor the other timestamps (questions and pages) are present.

I know this is a very specific case, but I’m having trouble pinpointing which service caused the error. I don’t have any logs showing errors on shinyapps.io or Railway, so I suspect my survey app may have overwritten those responses with blank values for some reason—though I still don’t know why. I’m writing this to get ideas about what might have gone wrong because I'm not even able to replicate the bug right now.

Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this!

[jhelvy]

Hmm, we'll need more information to try and get to the bottom of it. Sorry for this though, losing data is always awful. I've never used Railway, looks like a promising platform though.

Can you post your survey files somewhere to share them? And likewise, can you show some screenshots maybe of the database table(s) where you're seeing the problem? You can blur out or anonymize individual question content, I just want to see if it's recording session IDs, page IDs, and question IDs properly.

[jsalas-summa]

I am working with @vmigonesumma in this project. We implemented a button to go back in the survey in case a user detected a mistake after going to the next page. I believe this "back" button is giving us issues. Do you have any implementation of such a feature? I think this could be really useful for future releases of survey down as a native functionality.

[jhelvy]

That would be the key issue. We have not yet supported back navigation, and doing so without careful consideration of how the page navigation works would likely create major issues in both page navigation and data storage. See this issue on why we have not yet included this feature. If this is something that is desired, please post a new issue requesting this feature and we can consider adding it to the dev queue.