Creating a questionnaire app: which format to choose?

Question

Hi everyone,

I am working on an App which let's a user answer sets of questions from a questionnaire. The questionnaire will be created and published on a web-server. The Android client periodically queries the web-server to check if new questionnaires are available.

Each item from the questionnaire will be displayed in its own Activity TOGETHER with its direct predecessor (i.e. one item + the recent one on a screen).

Now I thinking about which format to choose. The choice seems to be between XML and SQLite3. I could either transfer an entire XML-document from the server to the client. I guess representing a questionnaire with different question types (e.g. rating, categorical, ordinal, etc.) will be easier in XML since it is more flexible. Sure, I could also do it in SQL but that would produce a couple of tables which reference one another.

Well, here come the actual questions:
- how should the layout be done? Should I create a couple of different xml files (one for each question type) in res/layout?
- how should I access the questionnaire data (probably from XML)? I could pass the Uri to the file via intent.setData(uri); as well as a pointer to the current item. But I'd have to re-read the XML-file each time which will be expensive. Or I could create a Questionnaire-Object which implements Parcelable which could then be added to an Intent as well.
- The questionnaire will have to be put together. So I am wondering if there are any open-source tools which will support designing the questionnaire graphically. I've only found queXML so far. It sounds very promising but items have to be created in XML code. Are there any GUI tools?

As you can see my Android experience is pretty limited so the data question (#2) is most important to me. So any comment will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
steff

Answer 1

#1 - You should create reusable XML layout elements for each section of your view, and probably put together in your Activity via inflater.
#2 - I would download a compressed JSON content from the webservice, process and put in local SQLite3 database for further reference, and history.
#3 - This is relative, since you have a bunch of screen resolution to target, you should build your own UI elements like in #1, and forget of using a open-source data representation.