Question library management overview
Rather than adding individual questions to forms in isolation, they can be created within a central library – a bank of questions that can be retrieved repeatedly for use in any number of form templates. Over and above the saving in time and duplication of effort, this approach ensures that common questions appear consistently, displaying the same phraseology, supporting background and tool tip text. In its simplest form, the library can be used to store discrete questions, designed to operate in isolation. However, it can also be used to store question groups, with all questions linked to a group being pertinent to that element of questioning. For example, an ‘eligibility and immigration’ question group could be created for use in a housing register application form. Individual questions relating to nationality and citizenship could then be created and linked to this group. Only the question group need then be added to a form in order to include all related questions. Furthermore, Civica Cx Housing offers the facility to link a question group to aspects of standardised data – referred to as an object – in order to present common database fields along with the bespoke question set. Extending the above example, it would be logical to link Contact Ethnicity to the same ‘eligibility and immigration’ group such that existing data already held for the contact would be displayed. Conversely, for new contacts, data entered directly within the form would be automatically transferred to their live record. Numerous data types are available to control the permitted question responses, along with associated rules to define the permitted range or criteria: dates, decimals, integers, Boolean and lookup types are all supported. For some questions, a single response would be expected; for others, multiple responses may be permitted to elicit all relevant information from the respondent. For example, an applicant may need to record several conditions within a medical question group and therefore setting the ‘multiples’ question attribute would facilitate this.
Once a question is added to a form, either individually or as part of a group, additional rules can be defined to control the conditional appearance of related sections, based on specific response ranges appropriate to the question type. For instance, a medical condition question group would only need to be displayed in the instance where a qualifying medical question was answered in the affirmative e.g. “Are there any medical conditions that need to be considered in support of the application?”
Amendments to library questions inserted onto the form are permitted, and managed as form-specific variations i.e. they do not affect the master question preserved in the library.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of question library management, including: