Question

I’m creating a framework for questionnaires.

The questionnaire has several questions. My situation is looking for a class called Question, which supports any answers as you want.

I mean, some questions require just one answer, others two, anothers needs strings, ints, double or any new struct what the developer has builded (imagine that the developer is creating a math problem where uses Fraction struct as answer, for example).

In other words, I need to support any data type or quantity of answers.

So I was thinking about creating an abstract class called Question, where this will contain a Dictionary of responses.

public abstract class Question
{
    protected Question(string questionText)
    {
        this.QuestionText = questionText;
        this.Responses = new Dictionary<string, object>();
    }

    public string QuestionText
    {
        get;
        set;
    }

    public IDictionary<string, object> Responses { get; protected set; }
}

For example, if I create a new Question, this will be the demo.

public sealed class Question1 : Question
{
    public Question1(string questionText)
        : base(questionText)
    {
    }

    public int? Response1
    {
        get
        {
            int? value = null;

            if (this.Responses.ContainsKey("Response1"))
                value = this.Responses["Response1"] as int?;

            return value;
        }
        set
        {
            this.Responses["Response1"] = value;
        }
    }
}

What do you think about this idea? My first doubt: is it correct that I included the responses into the class and not another independent class.

Answer 1

Who will be answering these questions? Let’s assume people. Given that, a person will probably be logging in or identifying themselves in some way. That makes me think that the Person model should contain Responses, with a reference to each Question.

// pseudocode 
class Person 
   int PersonID 
   IList Responses     

class Response
   int ResponseID
   int QuestionID 
   string ResponseValue 

class Question
   int QuestionID
   string QuestionText 
   IList AllowedResponses 
   bool AllowsMultipleResponses