Field management
E-mail notification
The cwemail module sends initial notification and reminders via e-mail. It uses a question as a template which may include recalls of values stored in the survey data base (probably via pre-population). It features tools to select subsets of cases according to any data in the data base as well as subsets defined by ranges of position numbers in the data set. Therefore, it is possible, for example, to send an initial invitation to all participants which includes their custom access code and which is delivered in their preferred language, and to follow-up with those who have initiated but not completed the questionnaire a week later with a motivational message which could be different from another follow-up to those who have not accessed the questionnaire at all.
E-mail notification is based on a special questionnaire variable which contains the title and text of the message to be broadcast. The following rules apply:
The following are required for the e-mail notification operation:
One option, offered interactively, allows for the simulation of the mailing: messages are displayed on screen but neither sent out not timestamped in the data file.
Managing bounced e-mail messages
Using the # Send bounces to instruction, bounced messages can be sent to any arbitrary destination, or to the cwbounces.pl script which logs bounced messages and attempts to signal them in the CallWeb data set. To activate this latter function, follow these instructions:
Automatic e-mail delivery
Using parameters set in # Auto email instructions, CallWeb can be asked to scan project data on a regular basis (say, every hour) to identify records which meet a certain condition, and to send them an e-mail message. The e-mail message itself follows the rules outlined above regarding formatting and recalling of record values. The generix syntax of this instruction is as follows (note: the equal signs and the commas are delimiters; use them as described in this example):
Here is a real life example:
One CallWeb project can contain any number of such automatic e-mail instructions (make sure they have different identifying strings) so that various circumstances (defined by the selection condition) can trigger different e-mail messages.
Limited substitution capabilities exist within the "selection" clause — essentially via the contexte list of data fields. For example, to trigger a message on January 1, 2009, the following condition could be used: