SurveyMonkey: Where is the text of my respondent's response? - surveymonkey

Question

I'm new to the SurveyMonkey API and it hasn't been too difficult to get payloads back from API calls, but right now I'm trying to get back what responses a specific respondent gave.
I have a survey which has two respondents, the first question on the survey asks the user to enter three pieces of information: Their Name, an ID and today's date.
So, if I do a call to get_survey_details, I can see the questions just fine. For example
obj.pages[0].questions[0].answers[0].answerid: "xxxxxxxx" //some long ID
obj.pages[0].questions[0].answers[0].text: "Enter Your Name"
obj.pages[0].questions[0].answers[0].type: "row"
There's a couple more pieces of information in that object, like whether the question is visible, etc., but these seem to be the pertinent pieces to the question I have.
So! I make another call to get_responses using the same survey_id and respondent_id (there's only two so actually I get them both).
In the resulting payload I get an array of 2 objects (one to hold each respondents responses). So I look in the first (obj[0]) and I see an array of questions and the respondent id. Fine. I look in the questions array and I see one object for each question and in each of those an answers object.
so that's:
obj[0].questions[0].answers[0].col: "yyyyyy" //some long ID
obj[0].questions[0].answers[0].row: "nnnnnn" //some other long ID
No response text. just this row/col business.
At this point, I'm super-confused (which is like regular confused, but with a cape). Where the heck are the respondents actual responses?
What the heck does "row" and "column" reference? Do I have to do some other API call with the row and/or column in order to get the text of the respondent's response?
I've looked through the documentation (and will continue to do so after posting this) and through stackoverflow to see if anyone else has asked this before. There was one question that came close, but really they were just forgetting to pair 'get_responses' with 'get_survey_details'. I'm doing that, but am still lost as ever. And I don't see any documentation really explaining in detail how this row/column concept works for mapping responses to the text of the response. :/
I know this is a really long-winded question, but I'm just so confused as to how to actually get responses out of this API. :(
Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

The text for a given response should come through under the "text" key. e.g. for a survey that only consists of an essay style question:
{
"status": 0,
"data": [
{
"respondent_id": "123456",
"questions": [
{
"answers": [
{
"text": "This is an essay style answer.",
"row": "0"
}
],
"question_id": "78910"
}
]
}
]
}
"row" and "col" literally reference the row and column of an answer - e.g. in a matrix question, there will be a list of rows for different questions ("what did you think of the hotel?") and ratings ("bad, okay, great") - and each answer is a combination of these. For a regular multiple choice question there will be multiple rows and only one column.
Calling "get_responses" with the correct respondent_id should provide you with the text response that you want. It's only the fixed details of the answer stored in the survey itself you should have to look up (provided in get_survey_details).

Answer 2

Using GET : /surveys/{survey_id}/details, we can get the corresponding question Ids along with the answer Ids.
{
"pages": [
{
"href": "https://api.surveymonkey.net/v3/surveys/87263608/pages/260492760",
"description": "",
"questions": [
{
"sorting": null,
"family": "matrix",
"subtype": "rating",
"required": {
"text": "This question requires an answer.",
"amount": "0",
"type": "all"
},
"answers": {
"rows": [
{
"visible": true,
"text": "",
"position": 1,
"id": "10788526669"
}
],
"choices": [
{
"description": "Not at all likely",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526670",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "Not at all likely - 0",
"position": 1
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526671",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "1",
"position": 2
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526672",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "2",
"position": 3
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526673",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "3",
"position": 4
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526674",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "4",
"position": 5
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526675",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "5",
"position": 6
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": -100,
"id": "10788526676",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "6",
"position": 7
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": 0,
"id": "10788526677",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "7",
"position": 8
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": 0,
"id": "10788526678",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "8",
"position": 9
},
{
"description": "",
"weight": 100,
"id": "10788526679",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "9",
"position": 10
},
{
"description": "Extremely likely",
"weight": 100,
"id": "10788526680",
"visible": true,
"is_na": false,
"text": "Extremely likely - 10",
"position": 11
}
]
},
"visible": true,
"href": "https://api.surveymonkey.net/v3/surveys/87263608/pages/260492760/questions/1044924866",
"headings": [
{
"heading": "How likely is it that you would recommend XYZ to a friend or colleague?"
}
],
"position": 1,
"validation": null,
"id": "1044924866",
"forced_ranking": false
},
{
"sorting": null,
"family": "single_choice",
"subtype": "vertical",
"required": null,
"answers": {
"choices": [
{
"visible": true,
"text": "High Interest",
"position": 1,
"id": "10788529403"
},
{
"visible": true,
"text": "Long process",
"position": 2,
"id": "10788529404"
},
{
"visible": true,
"text": "Low XYZ Amount",
"position": 3,
"id": "10788529405"
},
{
"visible": true,
"text": "Lot of Documents",
"position": 4,
"id": "10788529406"
},
{
"visible": true,
"text": "Bad customer service",
"position": 5,
"id": "10788529407"
}
]
},
"visible": true,
"href": "https://api.surveymonkey.net/v3/surveys/87263608/pages/260492760/questions/1044925207",
"headings": [
{
"heading": "What is the most important issue which we need to address for overall a better service?"
}
],
"position": 2,
"validation": null,
"id": "1044925207",
"forced_ranking": false
}
],
"title": "",
"position": 1,
"id": "260492760",
"question_count": 2
}
],
}
We can use these ids to decipher the answer we get after fetching responses using get response API(Bulk or each respondent).
For eg:,
If my survey has two questions, like
Then after fetching the responses we get a json like this:
{
"total_time": 34,
"href": "https://api.surveymonkey.net/v3/collectors/94630092/responses/5120000552",
"custom_variables": {},
"ip_address": "182.76.20.30",
"id": "5120000552",
"logic_path": {},
"date_modified": "2016-12-01T11:01:11+00:00",
"response_status": "completed",
"custom_value": "LAI100023",
"analyze_url": "http://www.surveymonkey.com/analyze/browse/EvaBWWcU9K1XTH_2FFFBTfFul4ge94MwVWvBk0eAFDJ3c_3D?respondent_id=5120000552",
"pages": [
{
"id": "260492760",
"questions": [
{
"id": "1044924866",
"answers": [
{
"choice_id": "10788526677",
"row_id": "10788526669"
}
]
},
{
"id": "1044925207",
"answers": [
{
"choice_id": "10788529404"
}
]
}
]
}
],
"page_path": [],
"recipient_id": "2743199128",
"collector_id": "94630092",
"date_created": "2016-12-01T11:00:37+00:00",
"survey_id": "87263608",
"collection_mode": "default",
"edit_url": "http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/?sm=SfTljxZSoBFvaRUeGSI6L813qctjfG_2FDCVcqCks7CDc4TcJC_2BNHqmPYD7NNTcvST",
"metadata": {
"contact": {
"first_name": {
"type": "string",
"value": "John"
},
"last_name": {
"type": "string",
"value": "Doe"
},
"email": {
"type": "string",
"value": "neeta#xyz.com"
}
}
}
}
We can map the questions and answers using their IDs in this response with the ids we got from survey details. For open ended text questions, we get direct typed responses.