Problems qualifying off high volume multiselect lists

Original text:

Hello! 

Many of our clients wish to qualify off of data points such as High School Attended, City, County or Zip Code; however, many of these fields are typically set up as Short Answers because an import file may contain thousands of unique values for each one of these data points.

If there was a way to "Lock" down specific values into the set list, and NOT populate the drop down with ALL the values in the import, clients would easily be able to add the values to the list that are actually going to be used as a qualifiers. I believe this would create a better user experience for our clients and they would be able to utilize qualifications more effectively. 

I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if you you have any additional questions or concerns. 


Background 

Imported questions with a high volume of options become cumbersome to select answers form and build qualifications off because there are so many options.  Since this list consistently updates whenever there is an import, editing the list is not possible since it will add the old answers every time there is an import.

Why/Impact

This makes for a very difficult user experience for applicants and administrators in that they have to search through a large number of options, most of which might be irrelevant. 


User Story

As an administrator, I would like to lock down a specific list of answers without them continuing to update so that it is easier for me to manage.  



  

  • Guest
  • Apr 12 2016
  • Reviewed: Voting Open
Employee Name Brandon Spiller, Monika Spreitzer
Client Name "shard name" ncsu, uwosh, auburn, bowdoin, uiowa, brown
User Support Admin, System Admin
Functional Unit Qualifications
  • Attach files
  • Guest commented
    October 23, 2018 14:50

    I've run into this again with BOWDOIN (ticket #81428) with their imported single select question for High School Code. The system is locking/freezing when they try to update quals using this FF on their end.

  • Guest commented
    August 15, 2018 18:52

    Depaul could use this as well (ticket #78134) Their import FF hs_code has ~4,200 unique fields from their latest import file, but the FF exporter has ~21,000.  All these answer choices are bogging down the system and it's freezing on them when they are trying to add hs_code quals to new opps.

  • Deleted User commented
    January 27, 2017 20:55

    Note to Seth:

    Your comment has definitely addressed one half of the problem here: clients sometimes have to search and select from a huge list of values.

    But the other half of the problem is that sometimes it simply isn't practical for us to even set up some of these fields as select-lists at all, due to the fact that there are so many unique values in some cases. For instance, a client may want to select just ~10 high schools (let's say from one city) that an incoming freshman may have come from. But in many cases it is ill-advised for us to set up a "High School" field as a select-list at all due to the fact that a large school can produce thousands of values in such a list. The performance impact becomes prohibitive so we often have to work around this.

    Just spitballing, this problem could be addressed by adding a simple setting to every Imported field, such as a checkbox, e.g. "Keep updated with imported values", or not. If the box was unchecked then the client would simply fill in the answer values manually, and presumably such large fields like High School or Zip Code could still be safely handled as select-type fields.

  • Deleted User commented
    January 27, 2017 20:43

    The ability to search the available answers when adding qualification fields should make this less cumbersome.  If there are additional pain points, please let us know.  

  • Guest commented
    April 12, 2016 19:32

    NCSU, UIOWA, Brown