How do we know a survey_id to be able to call the API?

Question

The API calls require a survey_id. There is a surveyID in the web link but that is an alphanumeric code that is not the same as the survey_id. eg https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/STB97HW is surveyID 47481373

The "Edit survey" pages do not show the surveyID. (by the way, I've just found that the category eg "Just for fun" is another one of those survey attributes not returned by get_survey_details) So a user can not make a note of the surveyID for later querying.

A user can download a CSV file of data, as a pair of "Sheet_1.csv" and "Collectors.csv" but neither of those files contain a surveyID. It would be a useful enhancement if, given a data CSV download, one could query the surveys list to find the one that has a given CollectorID.

The user could copy the survey title into a query and search the survey list for ones that match, assuming they copy it correctly or spell it correctly if entering it. Or the query could be by a date range, to get a list of surveys, present them to the user, and ask them to pick the one they want.

Is there no way that a user can discover a surveyID, either when designing the survey or when it is closed, in order to uniquely specify it for retrieval without having to go through this search process?

Answer 1

You need to use the "get_survey_list" API to get a list of survey ids, you can then feed these into the other API methods.

Note that a survey link is actually an individual collector for that survey, and not directly associated with a survey - i.e. it is associated with a collector, which is then associated with a survey. You can have multiple links (or collection methods) for one survey that way. You can get a list of collectors for a given survey using get_collector_list. get_collector_list can also return the list of URL links for these collectors, if they exist.

There is currently no way to get a survey_id without going through this method - these survey ids are not meant to be visible to the end user, usually for API integrations a list of the user's surveys is presented to them (via the get_survey_list method) and then they select one. If you're interested, have a look at Mailchimp, Zendesk or Hootsuite's integrations.