Work Offline With the Domandata Extension

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.

1. 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

2. Step 2: Install the offline extension if prompted. The install prompt appears only when Domandata cannot detect the extension and your browser is offline.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

• Do not publish from an uncertain state.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.

When you reconnect, the extension combines your offline changes with anything a collaborator saved in the meantime, the same way the editor combines two people editing at once. Nothing either of you did is thrown away just because the other person saved first.

• Different questions or settings: both sets of changes are kept.
• Different parts of the same question: both are kept. If you reworded a question and a collaborator made it required, the synced question has your wording and is required.
• The exact same field: your offline change wins, so the edit you made while disconnected is never silently lost. Check that question after syncing if you know someone else was working on it.
• Deletions and moves: a question or block you deleted offline stays deleted, and a question you moved to another block ends up there once.
• Block order: reordering blocks offline survives unrelated changes a collaborator makes before you reconnect.
• Flow: branches, condition sets, and variables combine item by item, so you and a collaborator can each add or edit different ones.

The extension keeps copies of your recently opened surveys on the computer so they are available offline. Signing out of Domandata clears those copies, and copies you have not opened recently are removed automatically. On a shared or public computer, sign out when you finish, and wait until your offline changes have synced before you do.

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.

1. Check Block Builder: confirm the latest blocks, questions, page breaks, and answer options are present.
2. Check Flow: verify branches, condition sets, quotas, and endings still route correctly.
3. Check Preview: walk through at least one respondent path.
4. Check Deploy: publish only after the synced version is the one you want participants to see.
5. Check Export: download or inspect a test response if the offline edits changed variables or recodes.

• Preview and Pilot Test a Survey
• Publish and Share a Research Survey
• Export Research Survey Responses
• Troubleshoot Survey Flow