ITEM Rules with multiple-allowed References

Aware2014

I am trying to color a list of Question attributes stored in a BO called Questions and based on whether or not attribute Answer is defined or exists.

It seems that using reference attributes is not allowed in the ITEM Rules for a Query, but you can use shortcuts instead.

However, it appears that shortcuts are not allowed for References when the multiple allowed box is ticked.

Since a question can have multiple answers (multiple students answer the same question), is there a way to accomplish the above scenario?

tford

You could make a Yes/No attributes that is set by a rule that indicates if answers exists. You would then use the Yes/No attribute in determining conditional styles.

Aware2014

Thanks Tom for that suggestion. I am just trying to think about how the yes/no might work.

Each student that logs in answers the same question set. They can return and answer them over a period of time. I'd like them to be able to each see their own respective questions that they have/have not answered via color coding.

If the Yes/No attribute were in the Answers BO that would still be a part of the multiple reference relationship and thus not available through the Item Rules, correct?

tford

To accomplish your goal, you might want to consider a change in data structure. I have a questionaire BSV that does some similar things.

In my case, for each RegularUser I have an attribute QandA. This is a multiple allowed reference attribute that has one attribute that links it to the Question BO and another attribute for the Answer. Their is also a QuestionSC attribute that shows the text of the question.

So, the highlighting become very simple because each user would have their own QandA instances to be highlighted accordingly.

Aware2014

Thanks again Tom - very interesting and it makes a lot of sense. I am going to explore that avenue. Thank you!

Aware2014

Here is how I have set it up per your guidance. However I must be missing something as it does not seem to function as suggested.

RegularUser BO
QuestionsLink Attribute: Multiple Allowed, Peer, Related to Questions BO
AnswersLink Attribute: Multiple Allowed, Peer, Related to Answeres BO

Questions BO
QuestionText Attribute (Plain Text)
AnswersLink Attribute: Multiple Allowed, Peer, Related to Questions BO
RegularUserLink Attribute: Multiple Allowed, Peer, Related to RegularUser BO

Answers BO
AnswerText Attribute (Plain Text), Peer
QuestionsLink Attribute: Multiple Allowed, Peer, Related to Questions BO
RegularUserLink Attribute: Multiple Allowed, Peer, Related to RegularUser BO

Any additional guidance would be appreciated.

tford

Not sure if your scenario is the same as mine, but in my scenario, I had only one QandA multiple allowed attribute in the RegularUser. I populated each User with ALL the questions. So, if there are 25 questions & 10 users, each of the 10 users would have 25 instances of the QandA BO inserted in their RegularUser record. Each of the 25 instances per user can then be evaluated for whether or not the question has been answered or not.

My Questions BO only contains a master list of all the questions to be used in creation & insertion of the QandA instances into each RegularUser instance.

Aware2014

Thanks Tom. That's good to know. I think maintaining the number of questions and persons on my system would not scale well.

Thanks for your help.

tford

I'm not real sure why you say it won't scale. You have to have the number of instances for all the answers in any situation. As I originally explained, the QandA BO contains the question only by shortcut.

Aware2014

I will noodle on it more. The issue is that there potentially could be thousands of users and thousands of questions and the question pool could change daily. So there is the technically scalability but also the manageability.

I just need to think through your proposed structure a bit more and do some testing.