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An Inquisit 3 Web license gives you the option of hosting web experiments on our
servers or your own. While most customers prefer the simplicity and convenience
of hosting experiments on millisecond.com, some choose to host the experiments on
their own servers for a number of reasons:
1) Participants will more likely trust an experiment or survey hosted on a recognizable
university web address.
2) Their experiment involves a large number of media files that exceeds the 20MB
limit for hosting on millisecond.com.
3) IRB requires experimental materials be on university-owned servers.
There are two aspects to hosting an experiment, the launch page and the data upload
service.
Hosting the Launch Page
The launch page is web page where participants go to start the experiment. The process
for hosting the launch page on your server is easy. Simply login to your Millisecond account, use the control panel to register your script, and choose the option to
host the experiment on a different server. The control panel will then allow you
to download an html launch page to start the experiment. You can then copy this
page along with the script and media files to your server. Your server
simply needs to be configured to allow all of the files to be downloaded. There are no additional
server requirements.
Hosting
Data Upload Service
At the end of an experimental session, the Inquisit web control must upload the
data to a web server where it can be accessed by the researcher. By default, data
are uploaded to millisecond.com, where they are saved to password protected folders.
It is also possible to send the data to your own custom developed data service,
although this will require some web programming on your part.
The first step is to set the location where your script will send the data. This is accomplished using the /file command in the <data> element. For example, to send the data to "http://www.myserver.com/dataupload.ashx", you would configure
the data element as follows::
<data>
/ columns = [date, time, subject, blockcode, trialcode, response, latency]
/ file = "http://www.myserver.com/dataupload.ashx"
</data>
The Inquisit web control will now send the data to specified location using HTTP
POST, a standard internet protocol for uploading information to a web server.
Next, you'll need to program the server so that when it receives an HTTP POST at that location, it extracts the data file and other information (e.g., subject id,
script name, ip address, etc.) and saves it to disk or a database. An ASP.NET sample
showing how to retreive various fields of data along with the data file can be downloaded here.
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