in trying to use miniextensions for school testing I need to limit the time for responses in a form (globally, not per field).
Currently I have Airtable formula field count the time difference between the time the response record was created and its last update. I have miniextensions form set in Save and Continue mode with Automatic saving (which triggers airtable field recalculation), and when the desired time is up, the response fields in the form use the corresponding condition to hide themselves. (I can use a similar mechanism to activate/upodate warning messages for respondents at various stages about the impeding end.)
Besides being somewahat resource intensive on the Airtable end this is a clumsy solution as it does not display the countdown timer to the user.
Can anybody think of a better solution?
This is a really interesting use case! I think your workaround is already about as good as it gets right now, but I’ll do some more experimenting to see if I can come up with a potential improvement for you!
In the meantime, I’ll forward this to our engineering team for consideration for a future release! I’ll post an update here when this functionality becomes available.
Also, could you please go into further details regarding the desired behavior once the timer expires? Should it simply lock certain fields, or lock submission of the form altogether? The more details we have about your desired use case, the better we can implement this feature in the future.
thanks for getting back: the most straightforward use of a time limit (global, form-level) in the classroom is to simply (auto)submit the form when the time is up. (Other options offered by dedicated LMS, such as grace periods, are totally not worth the trouble). It would be great to have a customized message for the autosubmission event as opposed to the general message after submission, but not critical.
Ideally, the time limit should be visible on every page (if multipage form is used) or stay on top (for longer, single-page forms, so that it does not scroll away from the screen).
Some teachers like to limit individual responses but it opens up all sorts of other settings and behaviors and I think this is again an overkill for miniextensions.
The only Airtable-friendly platform I saw this implemented in is JotForms, but they do not have the seamless Save and Continue option like you do, which makes it very impractical for testing.
Thank you for your message! This will be very useful to our engineering team when they look at this request.
As mentioned before I will post an update here when this becomes available, but at this point unfortunately I cannot make any predictions as to when this would be.