Version Notice: This article covers features in our r9/IS Pro platform. If you're looking for information on this topic related to r8, see Communicating through IntelliBuilder.
IntelliBuilder is designed to allow for collaboration between clients, programmers, and other team members. It is important to be able to communicate programming needs, suggest changes, ask questions about how to use the IntelliBuilder (IB) editor, and other issues that arise. To facilitate this collaboration, IB offers users the ability to leave comments on each survey element which can be used to provide feedback/input or act as action items.
If you need additional assistance, reach out to an IntelliSurvey team member for your project, contact a Support agent via our chatbot by clicking the Help icon in the lower right corner of our documentation, or email help@intellisurvey.com.
Tip! This article is part of a series. If you have not done so already, we suggest reading Getting started with IntelliBuilder (r9) and Survey elements overview for IntelliBuilder (r9) before continuing.
Comments
Comments are a valuable tool for survey design and editing that can be used for a variety of tasks, including providing suggestions for edits to collaborators, posing questions to collaborators about how an element should look or function, asking for assistance from project managers for tasks that you are unable to complete on your own, creating action items that can be marked for resolution, and providing a historical context of discussions pertaining to changes to survey elements.
Individual survey elements can include multiple comments, as well as multiple replies to a single comment. Each comment or reply displays the author and a time stamp indicating when it was posted or last edited. Comments can only be edited or deleted by their authors, while any user can mark a comment as Unresolved or Resolved. Once a comment has received a reply, it cannot be deleted. Lastly, a group of related comments can be collapsed by clicking on Collapse Thread in the upper right corner of the first comment, and clicking Expand Thread will restore the comments to their full view.
Creating comments
To create a comment, click the comment bubble icon to the right of the survey element. A text box will appear, allowing the user to input a message. If the message needs to be directed to a specific user, they can be "at-mentioned" by including an @ symbol before their name. Inputting the @ symbol will bring up a menu of users who currently have access to the survey.
Once the message is complete, click send (or press Enter on your keyboard) to add the message. Shift+Enter can be used to perform a carriage return (start a new line) in a comment. After a message has been submitted, it may be responded to via the "back arrow"
reply button.
Tip! Users mentioned in the comments, as well as those receiving replies to their comments, will receive an email containing the comment's content and a link to the survey. Meanwhile, the user that created the survey, or any user who is set to receive comment notifications in the Comment Center, will receive an email for all comment activity in the survey.
Resolving comments
When comments are submitted, they are automatically created as an action item with an orange Unresolved label. It can be changed from Unresolved to Resolved by clicking the down arrow and expanding the dropdown menu.
Unresolved comments (and their replies) are displayed by default, and when they are flagged as resolved, they are hidden. If you would like to also view the resolved comments, you can change this setting in the Comment Center. If the comment needs to be changed back to Unresolved, you can click the down arrow and select Unresolved from the menu.
Showing and hiding comments
The Show Comments toggle allows users to show or hide the comments column for the entire survey. To hide the comments column, click anywhere on the toggle. Press it again to show the column.
When the comments column is collapsed, there are two icons that can be displayed. Any survey element that has a comment attached to it has a light yellow color with an image of a comment bubble. Hover your mouse over the comment bubble to display the message(s).
If a survey element does not have a comment to show, the comment column has a white background and uses a comment bubble with a line through the middle.
Hiding comments for individual elements
If you only need to hide the comment thread for a single survey element, click Hide all Comments to remove all comments for that specific element from view. Then, click Show all Comments to show them again.
Comment Center
The Comment Center allows users to adjust the comment column settings, enable comment notifications, and export comments from a survey. To access the Comment Center, click the settings icon found immediately next to the Show Comments toggle. The Comment Center will appear to the right of the comments column. To remove the Comment Center from the screen, click the "X" in the top right corner.
All selections made in the Comment Center take effect immediately. No additional steps, such as submitting or applying changes, are required.
Time period selector
You can customize the time frame for displaying comments by clicking the Period dropdown and selecting a specific range from the menu.
Author selector
You can also select a specific author by clicking or typing in the field that says "Select..." and then clicking the box next the author(s) you want to include in your comments column.
Comment Status selector
All unresolved comments are shown by default. You can change this to Resolved or All by changing the selection here.
Show questions with comments toggle
When you open your survey's IntelliBuilder editor, all survey question elements are visible. If you want to only display the questions with comment(s), toggle the Show only questions with comments option. This will hide all questions that do not have comments. Click the toggle again to show all questions, regardless of comment activity.
Enable comment notifications
Comment notifications are automatically turned on and are sent to the survey's creator by default. To disable notifications entirely, click the Enable comment notifications toggle, turning it white.
You can also add or remove users to receive the comment notifications. Click in the field, and choose the user(s) you want to add. Conversely, click the X to remove a user.
Export comments
The Export comment history button allows users to download an Excel spreadsheet of all comments attached to the survey. Comments are organized chronologically, and the file includes the comment's author (Username), element ID (Widget), and the full comment text.
Next steps
If you are using the commenting feature, likely you are still in the survey design and editing phase. We have several articles that will help answer your frequently asked questions. Here are a few common topics:
- Collaborative editing — IntelliSurvey supports multiple users editing a survey simultaneously and in either editing mode (SPL or IntelliBuilder). The Collaborative editing article details the three ways to collaborate when editing a survey.
- Creating survey elements — Dive into a comprehensive guide on designing survey elements using IntelliBuilder with Creating survey elements with IntelliBuilder.
- Editing survey elements — If you are ready for detailed information on editing your survey with IntelliBuilder, please read Editing surveys with IntelliBuilder.
- Properties and attributes — To learn more about the available properties and attributes used with survey elements, read Common properties for IntelliBuilder and Attributes for IntelliBuilder.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.