# Requirements Document

## Introduction

The Survey Management feature enables survey administrators to create, configure, and manage online surveys through a RESTful API. This feature provides the foundational capabilities for survey creation, question management, and survey lifecycle operations. The system follows a stateless microservice architecture where administrators can create surveys with metadata, add various types of questions with answer options, retrieve complete survey structures, and delete surveys or individual questions when needed.

## Glossary

- **Survey_System**: The online survey backend application that manages survey operations
- **Administrator**: A user with permissions to create, modify, and delete surveys
- **Survey**: A collection of questions with metadata used to gather responses from participants
- **Question**: An individual inquiry within a survey that requires a response from participants
- **Answer_Option**: A predefined choice available for rating and choice-type questions
- **Question_Type**: The format of a question (Rating, Single Choice, Multiple Choice, or Open Text)
- **Internal_Value**: An alphanumeric identifier used for data analysis purposes

## Requirements

### Requirement 1

**User Story:** As a survey administrator, I want to create new surveys with complete metadata, so that I can establish the foundation for collecting participant responses.

#### Acceptance Criteria

1. WHEN an administrator sends a create-survey request with title and creator (and optionally description, start date, and end date), THE Survey_System SHALL create a new survey with a generated unique identifier and store all provided metadata
2. WHEN an administrator omits optional fields (description or dates), THE Survey_System SHALL create the survey with those fields left empty
3. WHEN an administrator submits an empty or whitespace-only title, THE Survey_System SHALL reject the creation request with a validation error naming the title field
4. WHEN an administrator provides an end date that is before the start date, THE Survey_System SHALL reject the creation request with a validation error naming the date range
5. WHEN a survey is successfully created, THE Survey_System SHALL return the unique survey identifier in the API response for subsequent operations

### Requirement 2

**User Story:** As a survey administrator, I want to add questions with answer options to existing surveys, so that I can build comprehensive questionnaires for data collection.

#### Acceptance Criteria

1. WHEN an administrator adds a question to an existing survey, THE Survey_System SHALL create the question with the specified order number, question text, question type, and mandatory flag
2. WHEN the question type is Rating, Single Choice, or Multiple Choice and answer options are provided, THE Survey_System SHALL create each answer option with its display text and internal value bound to the question
3. WHEN an administrator attempts to add a question with a duplicate order number within the same survey, THE Survey_System SHALL reject the request with a validation error naming the order number
4. WHEN an administrator submits fewer than two answer options for Rating, Single Choice, or Multiple Choice questions, THE Survey_System SHALL reject the request with a validation error naming the answer options
5. WHEN an administrator submits duplicate internal values for answer options within the same question, THE Survey_System SHALL reject the request with a validation error naming the conflicting internal values
6. WHEN the question type is Open Text, THE Survey_System SHALL accept the question without requiring answer options