On the evening of Thursday, July 18th, the CTS-IT will upgrade REDCap from version 8.11.2 to 9.1.1. You can expect a downtime for REDCap from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm while we complete the upgrade.
The entire REDCap system will be down so all users (including the REDCap Team) will be unable to access their projects during the downtime. As a backup, users may want to download copies of their project’s data collection forms from REDCap in case they need to collect data while the system is offline. This also means that participants will not be able to access and/or submit surveys while the system is offline so you may want to make participants aware of the downtime. If your project has surveys that are scheduled to go out via ‘Automated Survey Invitations’ during the downtime, they will be sent out when the system goes back online.
Note: You can get PDF copies of all your data collection forms on the Project Setup page (above the Online Designer button) or individual form(s) on the Online Designer page next to the data collection instrument’s name.
Once the system is back online, users will be emailed to let them know they can access REDCap again.
The new version of REDCap scheduled for release on July 18th, 2019 has some new features and several improvements to existing features, including:
New feature: Alerts & Notifications
- The Alerts & Notifications feature allows you to construct alerts and send customized email notifications. These notifications may be sent to one or more recipients and can be triggered or scheduled when a form/survey is saved and/or based on conditional logic whenever data is saved or imported. When adding/editing an alert, you will need to 1) set how the alert gets triggered, 2) define when the notification should be sent (including how many times), and 3) specify the recipient, sender, message text, and other settings for the notification. For the message, you may utilize customized options such as rich text, the piping of field variables (including Smart Variables), and uploading multiple file attachments. While similar in many respects to Automated Survey Invitations, Alerts & Notifications allow for greater complexity and have more capabilities. For example, alerts apply to both data entry forms and surveys, and they also allow for more options regarding who can be the recipient of a notification (project users, survey participants, etc.).
Improvement: When copying a project, there are now separate options for copying users and/or user roles. In previous versions, these were combined as a single choice “Copy users and roles”, but now users may decide to copy one or the other.
Improvement: The rich text editors on the Survey Settings page have now been updated to a newer version of the TinyMCE package. (Note: IE9 and IE10 users will still use the older version of the rich text editor because those versions are not compatible with the newer one.)
Improvement: New records can now be created directly from the Record Status Dashboard. If record auto-numbering is enabled, it will display an “Add new record” button, otherwise it will display a text field for users to enter a new record name to create.
Improvement: Links to the Online Designer, Data Dictionary Upload page, and Codebook were added to the left-hand project menu for easier navigation. Also, a new section “Project Home and Design” was added on the left-hand menu to contain all these links, as well as the Project Home and Project Setup page links.
Improvement: Added links to “select all” or “deselect all” for the checkbox options on the “Copy Project” page.
Improvement: Custom message for e-Consent Framework settings – In the e-Consent Framework section on the Modules/Services Configuration page in the Control Center, an administrator may define custom text (including HTML styling), in which that custom text will be displayed at the bottom of the e-Consent Framework section on the Survey Settings page in every project. This may be utilized for informing users of some information surrounding the use of the e-Consent Framework at the local institution, for example.
Improvement: Force e-Consent signature fields to be erased when modifying responses – The e-Consent Framework setup on the Survey Settings page has a new option to allow users to specify up to five signature fields in the current survey, in which it will force all signature field values to be erased in the survey if the participant clicks the ‘Previous Page’ button while on the certification page (i.e., the last page of the survey). In many situations when using e-Consent, it is required that if the participant completes all the survey responses and gets to the certification page but then decides to go back to modify some responses, the field (or multiple fields) where they supplied their signature must first be erased, thus forcing them to re-sign the survey before they complete it. This new e-Consent Framework option helps to comply with this particular situation. Note: Only freeform text fields, signature fields, and number fields may be used as e-consent signature fields here, and those fields must be Required fields.
Change: Added a link to the Codebook page on the Data Import Tool instructions to allow users to more easily find the raw coded values for multiple choices fields that they wish to import.
Change: The “Survey Settings” page in the Online Designer now gives slightly more emphasis to the “e-Consent Framework” feature to make it easier for users to find it on the page.
Change: When a user clicks the “Help & FAQ” link on a project’s left-hand menu, it will now load the “Help & FAQ” page in a new window to prevent the user from losing their current page context in the project as they view the “Help & FAQ” page.
Change: More explanatory info was added on the Survey Settings page for Question Numbering, Question Display Format, and Response Limit.
Change: The Data History Widget on data entry pages now displays the “seconds” component of the “Date/Time of Change” timestamp for when the data value was added/modified. This allows users to view the logging items with greater granularity for when data changes are made in narrow windows of time.
Change: The Quick Tasks box on the Project Home page was removed since all the pages listed inside it are now located on the left-hand project menu, thus making the Quick Tasks box redundant.
Change: Replaced many of the older icons in the user interface with Font Awesome icons.
Change: Consolidated the two project pages “Record Locking Customization” and “E-signature and Locking Mgmt” into a single two-tabbed page named” Customize & Manage Locking/E-signatures”. Note: If user only has access to one of these pages, they will simply not see the other page/tab.
Change: Improved accessibility on survey pages for users with visual impairments using screen readers.