When To Use Offline Editing
The Domandata offline extension helps you keep editing a survey when your connection drops or becomes unreliable. It is most useful during travel, fieldwork, classroom sessions, conference Wi-Fi, or any editing session where losing the current draft would be costly.
Use offline editing for survey-building work: adding blocks, changing question wording, reviewing Flow, and preparing a draft. Do not treat offline mode as a replacement for final online checks before publishing, exporting, or sending participant links.
Block Builder: Survey Editing
Install And Confirm The Extension
Step 1: Open a survey while online. Start from the survey editor so the extension can see the Domandata editing surface.
Step 1: Open Block Builder
Step 2: Install the offline extension if prompted. The install prompt appears only when Domandata cannot detect the extension and your browser is offline.
Step 3: Keep the survey tab open when possible. If your connection drops, continue editing in the open editor rather than opening extra copies of the same survey.
Step 4: Watch the save status. When offline saving is active, treat the editor's offline and sync messaging as the source of truth for whether the current changes are protected locally.
Step 5: Reconnect before final checks. After the connection returns, wait for the editor to sync before publishing, exporting, or sharing links.
Step 5: Recheck Export After Sync
What To Avoid While Offline
- Do not publish from an uncertain state. Reconnect and confirm the latest draft is synced before using Deploy.
- Do not edit the same survey in multiple offline tabs. Multiple unsynced copies make it harder to know which draft should win.
- Do not rely on fresh response data while offline. Export, quotas, panels, and response counts should be checked after reconnecting.
- Do not clear browser storage during an offline session. Local draft protection depends on browser storage remaining available until sync completes.
Deploy: Publish Only After Sync
Reconnect And Verify
When the network returns, give the editor time to push local changes back to Domandata. Then reload the survey in a fresh tab and confirm the latest wording, Flow, Preview, Deploy settings, and Export structure all match your intended draft.
- Check Block Builder: confirm the latest blocks, questions, page breaks, and answer options are present.
- Check Flow: verify branches, condition sets, quotas, and endings still route correctly.
- Check Preview: walk through at least one respondent path.
- Check Deploy: publish only after the synced version is the one you want participants to see.
- Check Export: download or inspect a test response if the offline edits changed variables or recodes.
Preview: Respondent Path