How to assign a Ref to a multiple choice answer

Hii @Lasse 

I’m a little confused by this. 

On one hand, it seems like the Create API has the option to use readable refs

      "properties": {
        "allow_multiple_selection": false,
        "allow_other_choice": true,
        "choices": [
          {
            "label": "Foo",
            "ref": "foo_choice_ref"
          },
          {
            "label": "Bar",
            "ref": "bar_choice_ref"
          }
        ],
        "description": "Cool description for the multiple choice",
        "randomize": true,
        "vertical_alignment": false
      },
      "ref": "nice_readable_multiple_choice_reference",
      "title": "Multiple Choice Title",
      "type": "multiple_choice",
      "validations": {
        "required": false
      }
    },

But on the other hand, there doesn’t seem like a way to see these refs within the actual response api. 

Similarly, each choice has an ID in the question, but none in the answer choices (in an allow multiple selection), so it adds a level of complexity to figure out what even the ID of the answer choice is.

        "answers": [
          {
            "choice": {
              "label": "New York"
            },

Am I missing something? Is it impossible to get an actual usable reference of some sort for the answers besides the label?

Thank you,

Ezra

HI @richard m  and @EzraButler 

Thank you both for bringing up this issue. 

I’m happy to inform you that our developers have now made the needed changes, and the Response API now includes the Ref for a multiple choice answers. 

I just made a test on one of my forms by:
 

• Calling the Retrieve form API, to get the structure of the form.
• Then I used the Update form API to change the ref of one of the answer choices in the multiple-choice question. 
• Submitted a response on the form
• Retrieved the response using Retrieve responses API
• And in the response payload I can now see the ref. Please See this screen capture

I hope the above helps with your use cases

Good luck with your forms.

Hi @Lasse,

I’m using custom multi-choice refs, and I can see them when fetching responses via the API, which is great. But they don’t seem to be included in the response webhook payload. Are there plans to include them in that payload as well? At the moment, I think we’ll have to just use the webhook to trigger a REST API call back to typeform in order to get all the refs, which should work but it isn’t ideal.

Hi, I was able to select some multiple choice by their ref codes. Actually the “other” option, as it has no ref it cannot be pre selected. Is there a way to trigger “other” to be preselected?

@richard m @jakefurler @tom.wf 

An update to webhooks below! 😀

• 🚨 Attention all developers! Upcoming Webhook payload changes developers

@Lasse Thanks! Is it possible within the UI to edit answer `ref`s with custom values? We want to empower our non-technical team to set these values.

Hi @Liz - I just wanted to tag you in for my question above as it seems you might be the most active in these forums. Thanks!

Hi, @joematune 👋 
Thanks for the question, and sorry for the slow response time. 

I can see it would be useful for your non-technical team to be able. set these values inside the UI/Form builder, but I’m afraid this is still not possible at this time. 

I will make sure to pass this on as a feature request with our Product Team, so they can consider this for future improvements. 

Agreed with @joematune.

It would be really useful to be able to set the `ref` for choices via the UI.

We are using Logic right now to set variables based on user choices, and that works fine for a question with a few options. For questions with a lot of choices, countries for example, it’s a bit tedious.

Hi @prerak thank you for sharing that context - I’ll pass it along to the product team!