Publish |
Until this point, questionnaire definitions have been stored in the application and have been previewed in the browser, but nothing has been published that can be used on the web site. This page is used to specify when to make the questionnaire available on a web site.
1 Enter a Starting date for when the questionnaire will be available live. On the Ending date, the questionnaire will no longer be available and responses that are late will be discarded. Settings on the Security page specify what will happen with such responses.
The dates can include a date, a time, or both. The formats of each are as follows:
Dates: MM/DD/YY (use 00 for 2000).
Times: 3:35 PM, 15:35, or just 7 or 15 (for 7:00 AM and 3:00 PM).
If the time is omitted, publishing will happen one minute after midnight. If the date is omitted, publishing will happen at that time today. Dates and times are in the format and time zone of the application server. A user can change the date format and time zone by using My ViewsFlash.
You can also enter the word "now", or press the Now links to indicate starting and ending times. If the questionnaire conflicts with a previously scheduled one, you will be prompted to override; if you do, the conflicting questionnaire will be rescheduled automatically.
When a questionnaire is published, it is available during the designated period. Sometimes you may have a period of testing before going live. By returning to this screen, you can set or change publication dates at any time.
2 After publishing the survey, it is likely that it will be first taken by a set of people who will test it and perhaps it will be refined further. Between testing rounds, and before going live, check the "Delete all data" box to delete test data, information about who has participated and who has been invited, and to reset tabulations to zero. If a survey is open, and data is collected, and the survey designer modifies the questionnaire in a way that requires a modification to the database tables (such as adding a new field), the survey will be closed until it is Published again, which will alter the table appropriately.
In a multi-page survey, when the survey is closed, there may be people who have completed the survey partially. Normally, those partial results are saved; checking the "Discard partially completed responses" box throws away partially completed surveys.
When Staging is enabled, two additional checkboxes appear:
Lock will prevent any modifications to the survey until
Lock is unchecked from this page. After locking a survey, it's a good idea
to perform final tests, and when successful, then remove all test data. If
the test is unsuccessful, unlock the survey, make the changes, and lock it
again.
Stage will write appropriate records to the staging area so that the survey can be moved from a staging server to a production server. This operation stages all items necessary for the operation of the survey, as well as any Styles and Invite Lists that the survey uses that haven't been previously staged or that have been modified since being staged last.
When staging, the Lock box should be checked. If a Style or Invite List is modified after a survey is locked, staging will be canceled, and the survey must be unlocked, locked again, and retested before staging it again. The purpose of this is to prevent a situation where a Style or an Invite List is changed after the survey was locked.
These two boxes are only available to a user who has a Staging Access Right. In a high-security environment, these users should not be the same as users with the right to Create Surveys. In this way, the survey creator is responsible for configuring the survey, but only users with Staging rights can lock, unlock, and stage the survey. This grants the Staging user control over when a survey is published, and assures that once a survey is locked it cannot be modified without her consent.
If Staging is not enabled, these two checkboxes do not appear.
3 The questionnaire URL is shown in a highlighted box. Clicking on that URL will pop-up the first page of the survey. This is the address of the questionnaire, and it is the URL to use to link from other web pages, to send in e-mail messages, etc., and to bring people to the first page of the questionnaire. When embedding the questionnaire in another page, of course, this is not its URL; this is the URL that will be used with the embedding system.
When choosing question authentication in Security, the URL is appended with the additional parameters required to acess it, such as &id=. A unique identifier must be appended to the URL for each respondent; to have ViewsFlash automatically assign one, use $*,like this: &id=$*.
When using captcha authentication by setting the session value to CAPTCHA in Security, the URL is changed to include /ViewsFlash/start.jsp?... other parameters, which is the URL required to present the CAPTCHA validation page first.
If you are using Invite lists, after the survey is open click on the Invite link to e-mail the invitations.
In a non-database installation, or when writing HTML pages to disk has been enabled, the actual file system locations of the created HTML files are saved are shown.
At the bottom of the Publish page is a URL for displaying a one-page printable version of the questionnaire, suitable for printing, without buttons or progress bar.