When designing a form's process, one may desire to give users the ability to provide multiple answers to a question or group of questions.

FormBuilder provides a question type to fulfill this exact need, called composite questions. Composite questions are unique from other question types in that they can be populated with questions of their own, just like a section. These questions, called "sub-questions", are grouped together horizontally.

When a user fills out a composite question in the form's contents, their answer will be presented in a table format. The user is granted the ability to add a custom amount of rows to the table, with each row containing a new set of answers for each sub-question.

To create a new composite question for your form...

Step 1 - Navigate to your form's dashboard, and open the contents editing menu using either the Edit Form Contents button under Quick Links, or the Manage button in the Form Contents panel.

Step 2 - Select the phase containing the section to which you'd like to add a composite question in the Global Settings panel (1). Next, select your desired section in the Form Preview panel (2), and click the Add Question button that appears in the Form Contents panel (3).

Step 3 - After giving your new question a name and adjusting any of its other settings, ensure that its Type is set to "Multiple Questions". Click Save once you are finished making changes.

The composite question will be added to the section you selected!

Step 4 - To populate the new composite question with sub-questions, select the composite question in the Form Preview panel. Along with the typical "Edit", "Copy", and "Delete" options provided for questions, additional options of "Paste Question" and "Add Question" will be available. These options can be used to create new sub-questions for the composite question or attach existing questions to it -- just as you would with a section.

Sub-questions possess all of the same settings as an ordinary question.

As an additional similarity to sections, the display order of a composite question's sub-questions may be rearranged. Once the composite question has been populated with sub-questions, the Form Preview panel will gain another option, "Reorder Questions".

Clicking "Reorder Questions" will open the composite question's reordering menu. Sub-questions can be rearranged by clicking and dragging from the hamburger menu icon at the left of each entry, or by clicking the arrow buttons at the right of each entry. The highest entry in the list will be displayed as the composite question's leftmost column, while the lowest entry will be displayed as the rightmost column. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page to save the new order and return to the Form Contents page.

Step 5 - Once you are finished saving any new sub-questions or other edits, your composite question will be ready for use!

Please note that the appearance of the question on the Form Contents page will be slightly different from its final appearance on the form's survey site, where it will display in an editable HTML table format.

For more tutorials on ATLAS FormBuilder, visit FormBuilder - Homepage.