Under the Hood - Form File Formats

In general, you should edit forms in EZSurvey's native file format, and the Web setup wizard will take care of converting them to HTML. To import an existing form, use File Import HTML

XML (eXtensible Markup Language):

EZSurvey reads and writes forms written in HTML and XML.

EZSurvey's native file format has the mnemonic EZF (EZ-Form). It is based on a derivative of SGML designed for streamed, object oriented data access. In generally, an EZF file looks like this:

<?XML version="1.0">
<!DOCTYPE ezsurvey SYSTEM "http://www.raosoft.com/ezsurvey.dtd">
<FORM>
...
</FORM>
...

EZSurvey files may be flat-compressed and base64 encoded. On many computers, it's actually faster to decode a small file than to read the file from the disk! If you prefer to use the human-readable, uncompressed version, disable compression with the File Preferences command.

The EZSurvey form file is human-readable, so you could write your own programs (in Visual Basic or similar languages) to generate forms for EZSurvey to edit. We suggest browsing forms that you have created to learn about the extremely simple form syntax.

You can also edit HTML files with EZSurvey. EZSurvey will only modify the FORM section of your HTML files, leaving formatting before and after unchanged. EZSurvey will skip table instructions contained within HTML forms.

Question Libraries:

Question libraries are simply EZSurvey forms that have been renamed with .EZL extensions. When EZSurvey starts, it loads every file in its home directory.

See also...