Hi there,
Im currently revisiting an old project which in essence was a random text generator using data from a survey I circulated using Surveymonkey. I would now really like to make this fully interactive and have the answers given in the quiz/survey automatically fed into the processing sketch rather than me having to manually put it in (which would mean keep taking it off my website and adjusting the code every time someone fills in the survey). It would really bring the project to life - but I don’t know if or how this is possible? Or if not, could anyone recommend a way round this?
I cannot see any reason why it wouldn’t be possible, but there are two bigger challenges
- How to get the data?
- Hosting the application
Now it depends a lot on how you can access the surveymonkey data. Is there an API you can use to access results? If only way to access results is through their webpage then you need to look into web scraping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
With application hosting I mean a place where application can be run or triggered at given intervals to collect data from surveymonkey. Sounds like you have that covered already. Anyway I wouldn’t make sketch to poll surveymonkey all the time, but if interactivity with fast response time is important then maybe once a minute or perhaps every 10 seconds. They might even have ToC that forbids or limits such usage, so longer interval makes it less conspicuous. You might want to make interval random to mimic human usage. In a perfect world surveymonkey would send a message after changes have occured, that can trigger automatic collection, but I doubt that.