[solved] closing a form after a specific duration

neon

Hi Opensesame fellows,

Is there a straight forward way to close a form after a fixed duration, if a response has not been entered?
I've had a bit of a search on the site and the forum, but haven't found anything - apologies if I've missed something and this has been dealt with before.

To clarify, participants get 20 seconds to fill in a text box in a form - if they press enter before, the experiment proceeds, but if they haven;t pressed enter after 20 seconds, the experiment proceeds anyway.

I've had a couple of ideas, but they arent working so far.
Any advice very gratefully received.

Best wishes,

Neon

neon

OK, so moving on, is there a way to use a parallel plugin with an inline script item to close the form? Does this sound reasonable, before I start fiddling with code?

Again, many thanks in advance for any responses.

Neon

Edwin

I don't know if there's a set way of doing this using forms, but you could always use the following code. It's a DIY text input:

# import the relevant libraries
from openexp.canvas import canvas
from openexp.keyboard import keyboard

# define the timeout
TIMEOUT = 20000 # ms
# define the text wrapping width
MAXWIDTH = 500 # pixels; or None to wrap text at screen edge

# create a Canvas object
cv = canvas(exp)

# create a Keyboard object
kb = keyboard(exp, keylist=None, timeout=1)

# response variable, to store text in
typed = ''

# get starting time
t0 = self.time()

# run while there is no reason to stop
stop = False
while not stop:
    # check if there is a new keypress
    key, presstime = kb.get_key()

    # process the keypress if there is one
    if key != None:
        # if the key is the Enter key, stop
        if key in ['return','enter']:
            stop = True
        # if the key is backspace, delete the last letter of the response
        # (but only if there is a last letter!)
        elif key =='backspace' and len(typed) > 0:
            typed = typed[:-1]
        # if the key is the space key, add an empty space
        elif key == 'space':
            typed += ' '
        # if the key is something else, add this to the typed response
        else:
            typed += key

    # show the newly typed response
    # (first clear the canvas, to remove its previous contents)
    cv.clear()
    cv.text(typed, max_width=MAXWIDTH)
    t1 = cv.show()

    # check if the response time has elapsed
    if t1 - t0 >= TIMEOUT:
        stop = True

# save some variables for later use
exp.set("response", typed)
exp.set("response_time", t1-t0)

P.S.: This does allow for weird keypresses; if you want to constrict people to using only a certain set of keys (e.g. only vowels), please use the keylist keyword argument when the Keyboard object is created, e.g.:

kb = keyboard(exp, keylist=['a','e','i','o','u','return','enter','space','backspace']

Good luck!

sebastiaan

Hi Neon,

There is no timeout functionality in forms. Once a user engages with a form, you have to wait until the interaction is finished, i.e. until the user has clicked a button or some other widget that closes the form.

So for now, the only options would be either Edwin's script, or the text_input plug-in, which is deprecated, but does offer timeout functionality.

Cheers,
Sebastiaan