On Thursday, April 27, 2017, the CTS-IT will upgrade REDCap from version 7.2.2 to 7.3.3. You can expect a downtime for REDCap from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. while we complete the upgrade. The new version includes several new features as well as improvements to existing features. Some of the most exciting features include setting response limits for surveys, setting time limits for survey completion, and new ‘Log out & Open survey’ option on data collection forms that are enabled as surveys.
- New features:
- Response Limit for surveys – Users may set a response limit for any given survey to prevent respondents from starting the survey once a set number of responses have been collected. Note: It can be set so that the response count included either completed responses only or both partial and completed responses. Users may also set custom text to be displayed to respondents on the survey page when the response limit has been reached.
- Time Limit for Survey Completion – Users may set the amount of time (in days, hours, and/or minutes) that each respondent has to complete a given survey based on when they were initially sent the survey invitation. Note: This feature excludes public survey links. When enabled, a new column is displayed on the Participant List where it denotes if a participant’s survey link has expired and also displays the expiration time if you hover over the icon. If the icon is clicked, the user can permanently override the link expiration time by setting it further in the future (to give the respondent more time), or else to expire the link sooner (or even immediately).
- Improvements:
- The survey options at the top of a data entry form now include a new option “Log out + Open survey,” which will simultaneously open the survey in a new browser tab while logging out the REDCap user in the current tab. This makes it easier for users to log out of their REDCap session in case they walk away from the computer while a participant takes the survey, thus ensuring that the participant is not able to go into the first tab and access the user’s REDCap account and projects.
- When creating/editing reports in projects that have repeating instruments, a new option has been added to Step 3 (filtering): “Show data for all repeating instruments for each record returned?”. This option is very similar to the “Show data for all events for each record returned” option found when editing reports in longitudinal projects in which it applies record-level filtering as opposed to row-level filtering (“row” referring to the rows in the report table displayed). This new option provides greater precision for controlling filters used on data in repeating instruments. For example, if a filter references a field from a non-repeating instrument, then it might filter out all data from repeating instruments and thus not display them in the report, which could be confusing. But with this option checked, it will return all repeating instances (as separate rows) for any record that matches that filter. In this way, it allows you to apply the filter to non-repeating fields while still including fields from repeating instruments in your report. This was not possible in previous REDCap versions.
- On the Logging page in projects that have Data Access Groups, a user that is not assigned to a DAG will be able to filter the logging results by records in a DAG. Below the “Filter by record” drop-down at the top, it will display a “Filter by records in a DAG” drop-down that is viewable only by users not currently assigned to a DAG.
- Better protection against accidentally overwriting survey responses when opening surveys from a data entry form. When clicking the “Open survey” option at the top of a data entry form, it will display a popup on the data entry form to inform the user that it is recommended that they leave the page without saving it in order to avoid overwriting or erasing the survey responses that had been collected in another browser tab on the survey page.
- Changes:
- Normal users are now allowed to enable (or modify) repeating instruments/event in a project while the project is in production. In previous versions, they could only do this while in development.
- Added a note in the “Compose survey invitation” popup on the data entry form to make users aware that if they manually enter an email address into the “To” field for the survey invitation, it is a one-time use only and that any other invitations sent out at other times will instead go to the email address found in the Participant List for that participant. No functionality has changed regarding this, but some users were not aware of this behavior.