Invite Lists

Invite Lists specify a list of survey participants. A survey can use an Invite List to send e-mail to participants inviting them to take the survey, or include the actual survey in the e-mail. It can also track who has started and who has completed the survey and send e-mail reminders to those who haven't. An e-mail can include an invitation or the actual survey itself. For complete information on how to use an Invite list with a survey, see Invite. An Invite List can be shared by many surveys.

Invite lists are defined using the Invite Lists page. Access to this page is normally restricted to the ViewsFlash administrator, who can relax this restriction from the Administration page. The Invite Lists page allows you to create a new list and to modify or remove an existing list.

Defining an Invite List

An invite list can come from a database, from a comma-delimited file which is uploaded, or from a comma-delimited file which is entered in right in the form. An invite list can contain more than one of these and can select a different source at different times; for example, the list in the form can contain a set of test participants, while the actual list resides in a database.

After the list is defined, the number of people in the list is displayed at the top of the page. When logged in as an administrator, two menu items on the left hand side, View List and View in Excel, allow previewing the list before using it. View List shows the list in the browser; View in Excel shows the list in that application.

Database lists

The first option in the Invite List page allows defining a list that resides in a database table, one person per row. Spaces are provided for entering the table name and the names of the columns that contain the e-mail address, person's name, user ID, and password. See Fields To Use below for more information about what fields to use when. If the list doesn't contain passwords, for example, leave that column blank.

The WHERE clause allows limiting the list to only a subset of people in the table. For example, if the table contains a field named "DEPARTMENT", then specifying:
DEPARTMENT='Human Resources"
will include only people the HR department.

LDAP Directory lists

The second option allows defining an invite list based on the contents of an LDAP directory. Spaces are provided to enter the attribute names of each person's email address, name and UserID. See Fields To Use below for more information about what fields to use when.

The Base name field is used to specify the LDAP base name of the directory containing the personal entries. In addition, the Filter field allows specification of an LDAP filter expression, if required to locate a person's LDAP entry. A checkbox, Search subtree, should be checked if the search for personal entries should recur into subdirectories. Note that in order to use an LDAP server, some application parameters must be configured. See Using LDAP.

Comma-delimited lists

The third option allows defining a comma-delimited list, one person per line. A comma delimited list uses the standard CSV format, where fields are separated by commas and can be optionally surrounded by quotes, as in these two examples:

Tom.Jones@yourcompany.com,Thomas Jones,TomJones
"Tom.Jones@yourcompany.com","Thomas Jones","TomJones"

The check boxes indicate what fields the list contains, in that order. First is an e-mail address, if used. If a user name is available, check that box and that becomes the second field in each line. If a user ID is available, that becomes the next field, and so on. See Fields to Use below for more information about what fields to use when.

The comma-delimited list can be entered right in the form, by selecting "Enter the list here" and typing or cutting and pasting the list right into the form.

For larger lists, create the comma-delimited list first, and upload it from your workstation by selecting "Upload a file". If the file is larger than 1MB, change the maximum size. Before uploading the file, be sure to press Submit first. Then press Upload, and in the Upload File page, browse to the location of the comma-delimited file and press Upload. Large files may take a while to upload.

Even though we refer to these lists as comma-delimited, if your list is tab-delimited, ViewsFlash will interpret that properly. A tab delimited list looks like this:
Tom.Jones@yourcompany.com(tab)Thomas Jones(tab)TomJones
A tab-delimited list uses only tabs to separate fields; any quotes become part of the field, so normally quotes aren't used. One notable exception is this form:
"Peter Duchin"<peter.duchin@yourcompany.com>(tab)Peter Duchin(tab)PeterDuchin

Fields to Use

An Invite list may contain an e-mail address. A User Name is optional, and can be used to personalize an invitation or survey with the person's name; if this type of personalization is not desired, there is no need to provide a User Name.

A User ID, when present, is used in combination with a survey's Authentication method, to track who has taken a particular survey and send e-mail reminders to those who haven't. Normally, using an Invite List restricts survey participants to only the people on the Invite List, but this can be overridden in a given survey. A password can be used when using the "Form" type of Authentication. See Invite Authentication for complete information on setting up a survey with different kinds of authentication and the interactions between the fields on the Invite List.

Dynamic Lists

A database list, specially with a WHERE clause, is not static. For example, one can send a survey invitation on one day to people in one department, and next week to people in a different department, by changing the WHERE clause. See Invite for more information.

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