Overview

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Philosophy

The core philosophy of RoundtableJS revolves around three main principles:

1. Modularity: The library is designed with a component-based architecture, allowing you to build complex surveys from simple, reusable parts. Alternatively, leverage our customized copilot in our cloud offering to program in natural language.

2. Ease of Styling: Every aspect of your survey can be styled using intuitive CSS-like objects, giving you complete control over the look and feel of your surveys. Design is an underrated part of the survey experience that can greatly enhance data quality.

3. Intuitive Timeline Management: RoundtableJS uses an asynchronous approach to page rendering, making it easy to create complex survey flows and logic. In other libraries survey logic is determined via callbacks that trigger when a page is submitted, which quickly becomes a nightmare to manage and debug.

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How RoundtableJS Works

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Survey Constructor

The foundation of every RoundtableJS survey is the Survey constructor. This JavaScript class is used to create new survey instances:

const { Survey } = RoundtableJS;

const survey = new Survey({
    condition: 'control',
    participant_id: 'user123',
    styles: {
        container: {
            maxWidth: '800px',
            padding: '20px',
        },
        button: {
            backgroundColor: 'blue',
            color: 'white',
        }
    }
});

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Elements

Elements in RoundtableJS define different question types. These are also JavaScript classes, each representing a specific type of survey question or content:

const { TextInput, SingleSelect, HTML } = RoundtableJS;

const nameQuestion = new TextInput({
    id: 'name',
    text: 'What is your name?',
    required: true,
    placeholder: 'Enter your name',
});

const colorQuestion = new SingleSelect({
    id: 'favoriteColor',
    text: 'What is your favorite color?',
    options: ['Red', 'Blue', 'Green', 'Yellow'],
});

const welcomeMessage = new HTML({
    id: 'welcome',
    content: '<h1>Welcome to our survey!</h1>'
});

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Pages

Pages in RoundtableJS are built out of arrays of elements. They are shown asynchronously, allowing for complex survey logic:

await survey.showPage({
    id: 'introPage',
    elements: [
        welcomeMessage,
        nameQuestion,
        colorQuestion
    ]
});

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Plugins

Plugins allow you to modify the logic or content of the survey across pages. They provide a way to add global functionality to your survey:

const myPlugin = new MyCustomPlugin({
    // plugin configuration
});

survey.use(myPlugin);

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Styling

All surveys, elements, and plugins in RoundtableJS accept an optional styles dictionary. This allows you to modify the CSS of any part of the survey using a JavaScript object:

const styledQuestion = new TextInput({
    id: 'email',
    text: 'What is your email address?',
    styles: {
        question: {
            color: 'darkblue',
            fontSize: '18px'
        },
        input: {
            borderColor: 'lightblue'
        }
    }
});