Forms on pavlovia

Builder
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So if forms don’t work on pavlovia (Forms work locally on Psychopy but disappear on Pavlovia), what is the alternative? I’m at the end of my rope with this translation from psychopy to pavlovia thing - if I had any idea I was going to have to learn not one but two languages to make this work I probably never would have tried. Sorry.

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Could you just use multiple rating-scales?

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I just spent hours doing this total revamp only to discover that rating scales don’t work either.

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I’m awfully sorry. :confused: :worried: I answered your post with a question, because I myself was unsure what the best way would be. Before you refactor your entire experiment, always try out in a small project, whether the component works the way you want it to.

As the post said, you’ll have to switch to the newer Slider component.

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Yeah you’re totally right, I should have tried out a smaller version first - wasn’t trying to blame you. Cheers for the help.

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Yes, although Rating Scale doesn’t work but Slider does. We’re working on better forms for both offline/online in next release. Good news is that our new popularity (pavlovia site licenses bought) means we have staff starting and hopefully we’ll be able to add new features much faster going forwards. So far we’ve been on a shoestring budget with mostly volunteer help.

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I’m not sure whether this could work for you but just to offer my experience, I went with using keypress responses. I put text on the screen that asked a question and provided answer choices, like a multiple-choice test question, and then had participants press the letter on their keyboard that corresponded. B for answer choice “b.” etc. It was very low-tech and not slick but got the job done.

I’m sorry you’re in the same boat as I was. I think I’ve got some gray hairs from the days I spent trying to figure this out. At some points I’m pretty sure there was cartoon steam coming out of my ears. I wish you and anyone else reading this for help smoother sailing from here on out.

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Good to hear, Jon. Best wishes with the development.

Great idea, Alissa - thanks for that. I ended up getting it to work with sliders but you’re right that would be a good solution. Thanks also for your kind words; the steam coming out of my ears was very real…

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@jon do you have an idea of when the next release will be that fixes these issues? I’m debating whether I should change my rating scale to a slider just for the sake of going online, or just wait for the update…

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I don’t expect us to implement RatingScale. Slider can achieve all the things that RatingScale can and more, while also having simpler code behind it.

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Hi Jon,
I had the same problem, I did not expect it… and yes, we should have tried a shorter version first.
We will change all our items to Slider, but can slider be “categorial” like a Likert scale?
We’ve used slider but it appears as a continuous so participants can chose in between the main categories. Is there a solution for this?

Many thanks! :slight_smile:
Laura

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yes, using ticks, labels, and granularity settings you should be able to control the appearance fully. e.g. a 7-point scale with labels on the endpoints and centre:

  • ticks = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
  • labels = [‘disagree’, ‘not sure’, ‘agree’]
  • granularity = 1
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Also though, given that you sound like you created a lot of these, you might want to use the Form component, or at least put your questions in a loop. In PsychoPy, when you find yourself doing something a lot it’s often a sign that you aren’t using the features fully :slight_smile:

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I’ve just used a form online for the first time. What version did they get implemented?

I discovered that I had to tick both Light and Dark styles in appearance and use choice instead of radio or slider. Radio fails entirely and slider didn’t show value labels.

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Thanks guys!
I discovered that if you want the labels to appear in the slider, you need to use this for (“hello”, “world”)

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@wakecarter I think Forms have been implemented in PsychoJS since 2020.2 but let’s say it’s been a “journey” :wink: These things are complicated to create from scratch*

We’ve just released version 2021.1.0 and there were several more fixes to Form Components in that release:

  • Instead of using radio call the option choice. There was some confusion about what to call it. Currently, Python supports choice and radio as synonyms, whereas JS is only supporting choice we’ll set radio as an alias online as well but for now choice does work everywhere
  • I think the issue with Light/Dark styles has been fixed too

best wishes,
Jon

*We’ve created forms with our own rendering from scratch because wanted WebGL rendering where we can get high-performance graphics. The other option was to implement in jQuery where it’s done for us but we wouldn’t have control of rendering to the same degree. Oh, you can also use jQuery yourself, directly though, of course via Code Components

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Just adding the search phrase:

RADIO is not a valid type for item

So that others can find this post easier than I did.
The current Form Component documentation lists radio as a valid type, which is not the case currently:

type
    The type of rating e.g., ‘radio’, ‘rating’, ‘slider’

Valid types listed in visual-2021.1.2.js are:

        HEADING: Symbol.for('HEADING'),
        DESCRIPTION: Symbol.for('DESCRIPTION'),
        RATING: Symbol.for('RATING'),
        SLIDER: Symbol.for('SLIDER'),
        FREE_TEXT: Symbol.for('FREE_TEXT'),
        CHOICE: Symbol.for('CHOICE')
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