Questionnaire Lifecycle Management

Differently from specifications and campaigns, the lifecycle of individual questionnaires progresses through the actions of both internal users (administrators) and external users (editors).

Internal users can:

• publish questionnaires.

  This is a multi-step workflow that depends heavily on the target publication profiles. All publication workflows:

  • can be triggered as bulk processes.

  • subsume rendering processes.

  • mark questionnaires as available for editing.

    They differ otherwise based on whether publication is online or offline:

  • in online workflows, target editors are automatically granted permission to respond to questionnaires, i.e. fill online forms for them.

    Target editors are identified in publication profiles and may be edited between questionnaire generation and publication. They are initially defined as parameters of questionnaire generation, hence part of the parameter suites used for bulk generation.

    Rendering occurs in client agents upon access to the system, like for other UI components offered by the system. Rendering is a continuous process which lasts as long as the editors take to complete questionnaires.

    note: this doesn't imply a commistion of internal and external interface.

  • in offline workflows, editing takes place outside the system and no special permissions need to be arranged for it.

    Rendering is now a one-shot process and the forms it produces are export artifacts that are tracked in publication profiles for inspection and preservation.

    The generation of forms brings in the specifics of supported formats, triggering associated layout mappings.

• export and import questionnaires.

  I/O processes are inherently associated with offline publication workflows. Questionnaires are exported to be dispatched to external editors for completion. When the responses are returned, they are re-imported in the system and tracked in publication profiles for inspection and preservations.

  No editing is allowed on responses, as any form of correction should be tracked inside the working system, following ingestion.

• ingest questionnaires.

  This process runs only on questionnaires that are marked as complete, and results in the import of the selection in the working system, as an editing session.

  The process can run as a bulk process, hence remains associated with expectations of resilience to individual failues and progressive runs.

• edit and remove questionnaires.

  Questionnaires can be selectively edited, though editing is carefully scoped to specific parts of the questionnaire model, and to a limited extent: selections do not accept data - i.e. administrative users cannot "respond" to questionnaires - and the ability to reingest responses is always preserved.

  Overriding certain settings in the publication profile is one case in point.

  Questionnaires can also be removed from campaigns, along with the corresponding parameter configuration from the suite.

In contrast, external users can:

• respond to questionnaires.

  This process is of interest only in online publication workflows, where the system is responsible for the preparation of responses. When publication is offline, the process falls outside the jurisdiction of the system.

  The process is long-running process and progresses through a number of sessions in which users interact with forms and make a number of changes, eventually saving them back to the system. The system provides validation feedback, real-time or computed upon saving.

  Preserving the history of these changes is not an immediate requirement. The process terminates when users explicity say so, and this brings the questionnaire to a completed state.