ViewsFlash 4.05 Release Notes

Release 4.05 simplified deployment and optimized database use in portals. Problems with updating data and user id's that contained apostrophes were resolved.
To deploy quickly, start by reading Installation.

In Portals, the Survey Portlet can now display all surveys that a user is elegible for, and surveys can be marked as available to everyone in the portal or use invite lists to determine who is elegible.

Release 4.01 incorporates three new Styles, named Accessible_, Accessible_LikertHeader, and Accessible_LikertBody, for creating questionnaires that comply with WCAG Priority 2 and Section 508 accessibility guidelines, including XHTML 4.01 strict. For how to use these, see Accessibility.

Release 4.0 incorporates two valuable new features that support using ViewsFlash as a Forms Engine: a Script language for branching, calculating, and scoring, and the ability to enter data into a form and to allow the user to revise the entry later by simply returning to the same form URL. This features is perfect for keeping and updating user profiles, for example. Note that live tallies count only the first entry, but analytical tools such as Univariate and Cross tabulation analysis analyze the modified entries.

For portals, a new Survey portlet 1.1 allows a portal visitor to see a personalized list of the surveys that he is supposed to participate in, and to click on the survey to take it. To support this, Invitation Lists can now be constructed with or without an e-mail address, and the portlet uses the list of user id's to determine who is eligible to participate in a survey.

Many international Cogix clients run their applications in a default language other than English. To change the default language of ViewsFlash, see Localization. This release also adds i18n style tags which translate the Next, Submit, and other buttons and other language-specific survey elements when using multiple language surveys. Existing styles need to be modified only if you want to take advantage of the new [/lookupi18n] tags.

DB2 support has improved with more careful use of varchar fields and support for long text fields.

New Custom Actions include SQLSelect, SQLUpdate, and Script. The first two allow a survey or form to lookup data in a database table to pre-fill questions and to write data gathered in the form to a table. Script allows calculations. When using User Security, the right to use Custom Actions can be controlled by the Administrator now.

Question Styles now include Date, Number, Email, which are used to validate text fields. New styles are added to the database automatically when the ?Diagnose=1 command is done after upgrading. The older styles CheckNumericText and CheckValidEmail are superseded by Number and Email, but they will continue to work if you are using them.

New servlet parameters:
"datareviewapi" is now required to activate the data review and modification API.
"appcharset" defines the application's default character set. Useful when the native locale is not English. The default is "UTF-8".

New license keys:
Release 4.0 requires a new license key in a new format. Contact sales@cogix.com before upgrading for an updated license key.

Release 3.9 supports Question Library, Clipboard, Staging, Reviewing and Updating Saved Data, and other new functionality

The Upgrading instructions have been improved substantially. If upgrading from an earlier version, please read them now!

A host of new question management functions are provided. See Question Library and Clipboard for their description. A new option in the Questions page allows renaming one or many questions. A question's answers can now be uploaded from a CSV file. A new option in the place page, Append to Survey, allows a survey to be put together from other surveys.

A Staging capability allows for running the software in a staging server and interfacing to staging systems. It can also be used to transfer surveys from one server to another.

A new question style, Ranking, allows easy creation of "rank items in order of importance" matrices. The style is included in the download or can be installed into earlier versions from the Style Library. Standard style templates have been fine-tuned for cleaner HTML; no functional changes are included, but please review Upgrading Styles. The Response style bars are now displayed using tables instead of images, giving better appearance and performance. The revised styles allow setting the maximum number of characters in a text field, and the number of decimal places to show in percentages in results pages.

Cookie authentication, when used without a cookie name, now looks for the User ID in a "ViewsFlash" cookie, and if one is not present, throws one with a random number for the user ID. This allows using the Save and Resume capability in large anonymous multiple page surveys; without this, some other form of authentication was required (session authentication could fail if the user left a survey open for more than a half hour). In places with rotating polls, a cookie that expires when the poll is closed is used.

New Security options allow protecting a survey with SSL Secure Socket Layer encryption (https://) and checking the "referer" header for specific content. The secure URL must be entered in the Administration page.

New options for showing archived poll listings allow showing archived polls in newest to oldest order, listing the poll opening date, and including the text of a poll question.

New Data Review and Modification APIs are available for system builders. These APIs allow reviewing survey data that has already been committed to its database and for editing that data are now available. These APIs do not support the Normalized data base format.

A new JSR168 compliant Survey Portlet is available as a separate download, for Portals which support this specification. A WebSphere Portal SDK spells out the required steps. Other SDKs are in preparation, but the JSR168 portlet should work with other portals. This portlet requires release 3.9 or later. Details at www.cogix.com.

Bugs fixed. In heavy traffic situations, Custom Actions that relied on ThisCall or setParameterValue failed because of concurrency problems, sometimes using the values from another request. Multiple problems when using Others and check box questions have been fixed. The storeflushtime servlet parameter now has a default value of 0. A database cursor leak has been removed.

Univariate and Cross tabulation analysis has been enhanced for multiple choice checkboxes. Percentages are now calculated against the total number of respondents who answer the question. For example, 62% can say they like sports and 75% like news. Previously, percentages were calculated relative to each other, so the numbers might have been 40% and 50% instead. Some bugs in tabulating and saving data entered in the Others section of a multiple choice question were fixed as well.

Release 3.8 is a major security enhancement release.

Application security now includes User Security, where users have Access Rights to places, styles and invite lists. For example, certain users may be able to create surveys in a place, while other users can analyze the data and yet other users can examine the raw data collected. The ViewsFlash Administrator is responsible for managing security throughout the application. The completely revised Application Security section describes all options available in detail. A new section on Extensible Authentication explains how to use custom authentication methods and custom user/role lookup methods, including an LDAP server and a properties file.

A new Where Used option in the Styles and Invite Lists pages allows Administrators to see where every style and invite list is used. When using User Security, additional options on these pages and the places page allow the Administrator to grant appropriate Access Rights to users and roles.

The Custom Action Validator class has a new method, substitutePipedParameters, which allows using Question Piping.

Invitation lists can now use an LDAP server as the source of people to invite to a survey. See also Using LDAP for configuration information.

Release 3.7.2 is a release for using surveys as ATG Dynamo Gears.

Unless you're very technical, skip down to Release 3.7 release notes.

This release incorporates new features for running ViewsFlash surveys and polls as ATG Dynamo Gears. These include additional Web Services API functions. cmd=getpollnames has a two new parameters, title=1, which is used to retrieve survey and poll titles, and smp=1 which retrieves an indication of whether the poll is a single or multiple page survey. cmd=ifvoted has a new parameter, verbose=1, which returns the appropriate error text from the Security page. Two new parameters can be used in a ViewsFlash query string, typically when including ViewsFlash output in JSP pages: outputtorequestattribute= is used in JSP pages to write output to an HttpServletRequest attribute instead of the PrintWriter; and nooutputstream=1 makes ViewsFlash use an already opened PrintWriter.. Another new servlet parameter, apiattribute, adds security when the ViewsFlash api is used from JSP pages. Finally, the onRequest method in RequestNotifier can now throw a ServletException if under duress.

Release 3.7 is a feature release.

This release focuses on using e-mail Invite Lists to Invite people to take a survey and to send them e-mail reminders that they haven't completed a survey yet. An invite list can be a comma-delimited file or a database query, and can be previewed in the browser or in Excel. An Invite can embed the survey itself right in the e-mail, or contain a link to the survey. When used with Authentication, survey progress is tracked and reminders can be sent selectively to those who haven't started a survey, to those who haven't finished yet, or to everyone. The invite list can be dynamically redefined during the course of a survey, allowing both inviting different groups of people at different times, or adding new people to the list even while the survey is open and e-mailing only new people on the list. By default, people not on the list cannot participate in the survey, but this can be overridden.

A new Authentication option, Form, complement the tracking capability. It displays a login form at the beginning of a survey, which are checked against the user ID and password in an Invite list.

A new page for diagnosing authentication problems better is included. If you are upgrading, review the Master poll and in the Security page, in part B of Authentication, enter in Display the following response page: viewsflash/unauthorized.html

Application server container managed security is now supported fully. A new servlet parameter, appsecurity=servlet, is used with new options in web.xml to provide two URI's for the viewsflash application. A public URI, servlet/viewsflash, is used for taking surveys and can be set up without authentication. An application URI, servlet/vfadmin, is protected using container managed security. See Application Security for how to set up this powerful option.

Other improvements include:

The ViewsFlash Administrator, using the Administration page, can now allow anyone to edit Styles and Invite Lists, which are normally only editable by the Administrator. Styles can now be entered by uploading a file as well as using cut and paste.

The two options for removing data and results in the Publish page have been combined into one, which now also allows sending Invites again to a list after a test period. A new option allows discarding partially completed multi-page surveys when the survey closes.

Simplified user interface. When using a database, options in the place Settings page that refer to writing HTML to disk are now removed, unless a new servlet parameter, writehtmltodisk=1, is used. Similarly, the seldom-used Webcast features are available only when the new servlet parameter webcast=1 is used. In the Security page, the Track duplicates in the database option is now used automatically when needed, so it has been removed from this page.

Database improvements. During servlet initialization, all ViewsFlash application database tables are created automatically and altered, if necessary, to bring them up to date automatically. However, there is one exception: when saving data in a Normalized table, the VWFDATA table index VWFDATAINDEX is no longer needed and should be removed manually. The application will work fine with or without it, but removing the index will mean less work for the database.

The menus on the Styles and places pages have been revised to make it easier to create, copy, and remove them. A new option in the Polling Places page allows very quick creation of single question polls.

If you are upgrading: see the notes above on Authentication and viewsflash/unauthorized.html, and start using that response page in all new surveys that use authentication. See also the note above about Database improvements and removing the VWFDATAINDEX from table VWFDATA. Review the new capabilities in Invite Lists and Invite. And don't forget, you can always call us for further explanation!

Release 3.6 is a maintenance release.

This release adds stronger database error recovery from dropped connections, an Others option in checkbox questions, an option to randomize the answers to a multiple choice question, and new Web Services API calls to retrieve all place names and to present multiple randomly sampled surveys. It also added support for MySQL and IBM DB2 UDB and on AS400 DB2 V5R1.

Release 3.5 is a feature release.

The focus of this release is increased complex survey functionality and administration, including dynamic question skipping and next page selection, question validation with JavaScript, copying and rearranging multiple questions, more powerful Custom Actions, data analysis with "Others", improved error reporting, more flexible support for databases, and new Style tags. Details:

• A complete example of Validation, Branching and Scoring, and using the new Index is included.
• A usability review simplified the user interface throughout.
• Excel XP is now supported (some functions only worked with older versions of Excel)
• A new Questionnaire Style Template is used for creating multiple page surveys. It incorporates a progress meter, page title, header and footer, a presentation-quality look for creating fully professional looking surveys out of the box, and JavaScript Data Validation.
• Revised Style Templates include Standard_, ResultsPage, QuizResults, UnivariateReport, XtabReport.
• New Question Styles include LikertHeader, LikertBody, CheckAlphaNumericText, CheckNumericText, CheckValidEmail, ColumnBegin, ColumnBreak, and ColumnEnd.
• The following templates are deprecated: MultiPageSurvey (superseded by Questionnaire), LikertAcross (superseded by LikertHeader and LikertBody) andLikertDown. Deprecated templates continue to work, but are no longer recommended.
• Completely flexible Questionnaire Branching is now possible.
• The authenticated user ID can now be used in question piping by using the [/authenticateduserid] tag. So can the place and poll name,with [/spotname].[/pollname], and [/pollid].
• An improved Design Questions page includes multiple question copying, moving and removing in one operation. Custom Actions and branching information are now highlighted in red for visibility. Automatically generated question numbers are used throughout the application, making it easier to refer to a question in large surveys, while specific questions can be marked as unnumbered. A Questionnaire Index provides a bird-eye's view of questions, answers, branching patterns and custom actions which is extremely helpful when working on large surveys.
• New or improved Style Tags for poll pages: thispagenumber, numberpages, percentcomplete. These are used to construct survey progress bars in the Questionnaire style. [/ifremaining] can now test for -1 to see if a poll is closed and -2 to see if it is open without a closing time.
• New Style Tags for response pages: ifpollcount now includes a range of values. The {/ syntax is explained.
• New Style Tags for quizzes. The revised QuizResults style includes new tags useful in assessments and quizzes: ifdefault, endifdefault.
• Question Styles now have a methodology for validating entered input with JavaScript Data Validation. Three new question styles included are: CheckNumericText, an edit box that only allows numbers to be entered; CheckAlphaNumericText, another edit box that checks for USASCII letters and numbers, and CheckValidEmail, a text box that tests for valid E-mail address syntax. From these, you can easily construct your own and add them to the Styles and share them in a new public Styles Library in the www.cogix.com support area.
• The Administrator can now copy a poll or survey between places, which allows for sharing a successful or model survey between departments, for example.
• New Custom Actions are included for calculating weighted scores and for complex branching.
• New Custom Action methods allow a execution before a page is composed, as well as when a page is submitted, and redirecting the survey to a subsequent question. Additional convenience methods have been added.
• Repetitive Log entries are automatically suppressed if entered too often.
• New location for viewsflash.properties makes upgrading easier
• Database connectivity through standard Named Data Sources is now available. Additional instructions are provided for MSSQL. The Normalized database storage option is now enabled by default, without requiring the databaseextension servlet parameter. A new dbtablenameprefix servlet parameter can be used to provide an explicit schema name for ViewsFlash database tables.
• Univariate and Crosstabulations now count "Others" either individually or together. When used with a question of type text or hidden, turning Live Tally on is required to count them individually. See Scoring. A new setting on the Live Tally page enables fine-grained control over how many different values to tally in a text or hidden question, with a default of 250.
• Additional information is provided on using a question as the authenticated user ID and the required Security page settings and special tags that can be used to construct a complete URL for resuming a survey.
• Questions of type edit, hidden, text and multiline text now allow setting a default value, by entering it into the first answer's text.
• The "maximum field size" option in the Define a Question page was removed as it is no longer relevant.
• Archiving Keywords has been removed from the Design Questions page for lack of use.
• The following bugs have been fixed. A survey that didn't tally any questions was not being saved to the database. Retrieving data saved using the Normalized database took extremely long times with large numbers of respondents. The default answer to a question didn't work with drop-down menu style questions. Validation checks are no longer made after clicking Save or Previous in a multi-page survey. Question numbering sometimes failed with Question Styles.

Release 3.4 is a maintenance release.

• Some problems with Custom Actions in multi-page surveys are solved
• Includes new Custom Action classes testAction, a sample class very useful for learning how Custom Actions work
• Includes atgLoadFromProfile, used with ATG Dynamo for reading Properties from a Dynamo Profile.
• A new way to do multi-page surveys in multiple languages is introduced.
• A new way to save cookies, IP addresses, HTTP headers, and servlet session values and attributes is available in Save Options under Browser Value (renamed from Cookie Value).

Release 3.4 is a feature release.

• A JSP SDK for integrating Cogix polls and surveys with JSP pages is now available.
• An ATG Dynamo SDK for integrating Cogix polls and surveys with ATG's Dynamo pages is now available.
• Question Style Templates allow giving a portion of a survey a distinctive look and behavior. Useful in constructing Likert scales and specialized browser behaviors.
• Multi-page surveys now show Page Breaks and Question Skips visually in the Design Poll page. "NoAnswer" now allows skipping to a particular question when someone leaves a question unanswered.
• Single question poll creation is easier thanks to a "Make Single Question Poll" button on the place page.
• In Analysis, hidden fields with enumerated lists of values can be defined and analyzed using Univariate and Cross tabulation tools. Averages and Standard Deviations are now calculated on Edit fields whose values are not enumerated in advance.
• Poll naming has been enhanced so that, for example, a poll can be named "Monday" in two different places.
• Default Style Templates now have appearance settings in the place settings page, rather than on the Design Poll and Design Response pages.
• Web Application packaging makes it easier to install ViewsFlash in standard application and servlet servers.
• Question piping allows using values entered on one survey page on subsequent pages and redirects. This, combined with the Numeric Score extensible class, allow construction of elaborate Quizzes.
• Webcast Surveys allow for a survey to be conducted during a live webcast. In addition, the survey questions can also be presented during an archived replay of the webcast at the same time as the original presentation. See also the comparison with Webcast Polling.
• New Extensible classes include: NumericScore, IssueHttpCommand, WebcastEvent, atgOraclePooledDataSource.
• Enhanced archive displays. The [/pollresults] tag in an archived poll display will shows results for all polls in an archive when the query string includes &showallresults=1.
• Additional Web Services API parameters. 'stylesfx' allows retrieving voting forms and results using different style templates; useful for presenting a survey or poll in multiple formats (html/wml/xml) simultaneously. 'pollidsfx' allows retrieving voting forms and results using alternate wordings, eg., in multiple languages, but referring to the vote counts on the underlying poll.
• New Servlet Parameters: webappname, appwebroot, webcasteventextension.

Release 3.3 is a feature release.

• Cross tabulations and Univariate Analysis capabilities have been added. Researchers can, using these pages, easily and quickly slice and data data using standard single variable measurements and 2 and 3-way cross tabulations with Chi Square and t-test scores.
• Tables created by ViewsFlash can now contain a sequence number.
• A new option in the place Settings page lets you receive an e-mail when polls and surveys are opened and closed.
• Additional database error recovery settings allow for fine tuning. Recommended when creating your own database tables rather than letting ViewsFlash create them for you.

Release 3.2 is a feature release.

• Internationalization allows designing and conducting surveys and polls in any language in the world, including European and Asian, using any character set encoding supported by Java, including Unicode.
• MSSQL Support is also included in this release.

Release 3.1.1 is a feature release.

• Extensible Database Storage adds the ability to store collected data in a database in custom formats. The extensible class provided uses a single table to store all responses to all surveys. Some database administrators prefer this approach to storage. Source code is provided.
• In multi-page surveys, redirection after certain failure conditions was not working properly. These bugs have been fixed.

Release 3.0 is a major architectural release.

 Peer Architecture. When used with a database, multiple ViewsFlash instances on multiple machines can store all data in the database, including configuration, poll and survey data, in an industry-standard peer architecture. Should one server fail, the remaining ones take its place seamlessly. Migration utilities for prerelease 3.0 data are provided. JDBC 2.0 connection pooling and caching is supported.

• Additional API commands. cmd=geteither, allows retrieving the voting form if a visitor has not voted, or the current results if they have voted already. Cmd=ifvoted tests this condition and retrieves 1 or 0.
• Integrating with Application Servers. This new section explains how to communicate, using the Web Services API, between a hosting Application Server such as Dynamo, and the ViewsFlash servlet, especially when they both reside on the same VM.
• ATG Dynamo integration, including using the "repository id" from the Profile for authentication, saving data right to the Profile, embedding polls and personalized quizzes in dynamic pages, and presenting randomized, interstitial surveys, personalized based on Slots programmed by Scenarios.
• Additional Java extensibility is available for integrating with application servers. New features include extensible authentication code, passing parameters using servlet request attributes, writing response data to the servlet context. Cmd=geteither, nooutputclose, nooutputheaders
• Record who voted on database, a new option on the Security page, allows for scalable authenticated voting when used with authenticated surveys and voting. This setting must be used for reliable results in distributed configurations.
• Polling during Webcasts. Live focus groups and audience surveys are now possible using browser JavaScript and new publishing commands.
• Miscellaneous.
  - A txtpath= servlet parameter allows portending a different directory for .txt files that save survey or poll response data.
  - A hidden field can have a default value; just enter one answer. The poll style template you use must have an [/allanswers] block in its [/hidden] section; see the revised Standard_.html template.
  - The default method for reading servlet parameters has changed to the more standardized getParameterNames(); the legacy method of reading the request input stream directly is still available by using servlet parameter servletrequestinputstream=1.

Release 3.0.1

• is a maintenance release. It fixes import problems that affected clients migrating from earlier versions. On distributed database systems, it offers better real-time results display and fixes a problem that rendered random sampling inoperative.
  

Previous release notes.

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