place Settings

To create a questionnaire, first click on the Current link at the top of the page.

The Place page has three sections, chosen by the links at the top of the page: Current, Archived, and Settings. Current lists questionnaires that are in progress. Archived lists closed questionnaires. Settings changes Place characteristics.

Choose a form Style to use when composing the questionnaires in this Place. Standard is the default. The Appearance link opens up a set of defaults that can change the width of the questionnaire, the font, size, and color used, whether a progress bar should be included, whether a border should appear around questions, and whether an image or logo should appear on each questionnaire's page.

Click here for additional technical information when not running ViewsFlash on a database and embedding polls on web pages

If you've chosen a full Page template, check "a complete web page". Check this also if you are using your site's content management system to dynamically embed polls. In either case, skip to step 3.

For embedding polls, it is useful to study the section on The Production Cycle before attempting to embed polls. We recommend using the software with entire web pages first, and then proceeding to embedding polls in containing pages.

If you check "An HTML fragment...", provide the page in which the voting form is to be embedded. This location is relative to the main web server's root folder, as seen by the ViewsFlash machine. For example, if this page is at http://yourcompany.com/pages/page1.html, enter pages/page1.html here.

Then, indicate whether the containing page has a server side include to bring in the fragment, whose name will be determined by steps 5 and 6, or whether ViewsFlash should actually modify the containing page and insert the fragment's HTML in it, between <vwf=embed> and <vwf=endembed> tags.

The checkbox "Save these files to disk as well as on the database" appears if you are using a distributed configuration that will be writing these pages or fragments to the database. Check this box if you want to write these to the file system as well as the database.

The Appearance link opens up a set of defaults that can change the width of the response, the font, size, and color used, and the color of response bars when revealing results to participants is chosen.

Click here for additional technical information when not running ViewsFlash on a database and embeding results on a web page.

If the response is to be an entire web page, or if you are using a Content Management system, choose "a complete web page". Otherwise, ViewsFlash will make a copy of that page and will embed the live results between the <vwf=embed> and <vwf=endembed> tags, and display the entire page.

The HTML files for a place can be written to their own directory under the web server's root directory. Specify that directory here.

4 For most uses, choose "Concurrently". Multiple questionnaires can be opened simultaneously with this setting. Choose "One at a time" when scheduling only one current poll at a time in a place, such as when creating a daily poll for the home page of a web site.

When using password security, the Place and its questionnaires can be protected by choosing this option and entering a password twice. Note that the ViewsFlash Administrator password gains access to all places, and can be used to change the password in a place. When using User Security, this field is not shown.

When logged in as an Administrator, an option to Lock this place is shown. Checking this box prevents users from creating or deleting questionnaires and from accessing this page. Only administrators can change this setting. This option is used to protect the Examples and the Default places, making users use the Practice place or their own places instead. This option is only available when using User Security.

5 If there is no questionnaire scheduled, and an attempt is made to display the "current" questionnaire, the message in this field will be displayed instead. Normally, a single space will suffice. You can also display a message like "There are no polls open at this time." You can use HTML in the message.

After the options have been chosen, press Submit and continue with the Create Questionnaire link.

Place Settings