Architecture

Currently, questionnaire management is supported with a module of the main application, the Input System. As such, it shares its release and deployment lifecycle, and it accesses reference data, dataset metadata, and statistical data and metadata directly through the same storage APIs and protocols.

For the evolution of questionnaire management, we make a different architectural choice. We place it in a standalone and dedicated application, sws-questionnaires, and accept that the application will communicate with the Input System through network APIs that retrieve and re-ingest all the relevant data and metadata.

In fact, we introduce a second standalone application, sws-forms, a satellite of sws-questionnaires which renders questionnaires as online forms from the public side of the firewall.

We make these choices in the background of our broader plans for the Statistical Working Platform, where the Input System becomes part of a suite of distributed and functionally-focused applications, cooperating and coordinated but otherwise autonomous in release, deployment, and operations. The sdmx-browser was a first example of such application, sws-questionnaires andsws-forms are two additional ones.

In this Section we revisit the choice of a distributed platform in the specific context of questionnaire management. We then discuss in more depth the architecture sws-questionnaires and sws-forms, as well as their interfaces with the Input System and each other.