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I am using the API to GET and FETCH data from my 150 or so Google surveys. For some surveys I find the FETCH works OK but the GET is rejected with error 503. For instance:

HttpError 503 when requesting https://www.googleapis.com/consumersurveys/v2/surveys/6mndemyqw5b5k?alt=json returned "Survey is configured in a way not supported by the API, i.e. contains unsupported question types or options Request Id: 5750b15c00ff025d5da8b9f4b00001737e3430322d747269616c320001707573682d30362d30322d7231330001010a

The surveys are nearly all one single response questions and were created with the web interface. The common factor I notice is that the failing surveys I have looked at all contain an answer with a non-Latin character, e.g. Siân Berry (Green).

Whatever the reason, this is quite a problem because the GET operation is the only one that returns a full list of answers in the originally specified order. Also, the question text itself is only otherwise available by scraping the Overview sheet of the exported XLS file. I say scraping because so far as I can tell the spreadsheet format is neither documented nor stable - for instance the response data used to be in worksheet "1" but more recently seem to be in worksheet "Complete responses".

Iain MacKay
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  • Very surprised to find this closed in this way. The question identified a problem in sufficient detail for it to be acknowledged as a fault, which was then addressed by the Google engineers. – Iain MacKay Oct 02 '17 at 23:51
  • Google surveys is a paid-for service, and Stack Overflow is a rather indirect path to address urgent production problems, but it worked in this case perfectly well. Except for this disrespectful and surely inappropriate closure and down vote by someone who seems to be an uninvolved third party. It was Google's choice to offer support in this way not mine! – Iain MacKay Oct 02 '17 at 23:58

2 Answers2

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This issue has been resolved. We'll new return the UK 'country' in the 'audience.countrySubdivision' for those surveys.

The cause was that for a few countries (US, CA, UK) the GCS UI allows surveys to be targeted by macro-region (e.g. US-WEST, CA-PRAIRIES, UK-ENGLAND) in addition to state (US), province(CA), or Nuts-1 region (UK) which are targeted in the API via the 'audience.countrySubdivision' property.

To provide a consistent API across all countries, we do not offer macro-region targeting in the API and that will not change with this fix. However, to allow you to access your data which was created that way through the UI we will now return Surveys that are targeted to macro-regions by putting the region into the 'audience.countrySubdivision' property.

Forbes Husted
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Thanks for reaching out. It appears that the surveys that are failing are all targeted to the UK-England region and have root caused the underlying issue which has to do with NUTS 1 region codes. We'll work on getting a fix out asap.

Michael Sindelar
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  • Thanks Michael. Listing the problematic surveys it does indeed seem they are all geographically targeted - England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. – Iain MacKay Jun 03 '16 at 08:23