Anatomy of a survey: pages, blocks and questions
A survey has three levels of structure. Nearly everything else in this category — logic, validation, piping, versions — is described in terms of them, so it’s worth ten minutes up front.
Pages
A page is what a respondent sees at once. They answer what’s on it, press through, and the next page loads.
Pages are the unit of navigation, which makes them the unit of logic too: skipping and branching move a respondent to a page, and an answer can only drive a question the respondent hasn’t reached yet. That’s the practical reason to split a long survey across pages rather than putting everything on one — anything you want to react to has to be on an earlier page than the thing reacting to it.
Blocks
A block is a titled group of questions inside a page. Blocks keep related questions together, give them a heading a respondent can see, and act as a unit you can show or hide with a single display rule rather than one per question.
A page needs at least one block, and a block can hold as many questions as you like.
Questions
A question is one thing asked. Every question has:
- Text — what you’re asking.
- A description and information — optional supporting text and a help tooltip.
- A type — text, choice, matrix, slider and the rest. See Question types.
- A key — the short identifier the question is known by in exports and in piping tokens.
- Settings specific to its type, choices where the type has them, and rules.
Questions are ordered within their block, blocks within their page, and pages within the survey. Reordering any level is drag and drop in the builder.
Groups: a question that holds questions
One type is structural rather than a thing to answer. A group question holds other questions and lets a respondent complete the whole set more than once — “add each medication you take”, “add each previous address”. Each repeat is stored separately, so you get a clean set of repeated records rather than one long text box.
Groups nest one level: a group holds questions, not other groups.
Where you do all this
The Build tab is the editor. Selecting a page, block, question or choice opens its editor in the drawer on the right, with that item’s own settings, rules and — for questions with them — choices. The drawer is resizable, and the survey outline stays visible beside it.