REDCap Update User Summary
Dear REDCap Users,
Please note that Tuesday, Aug 26th (tomorrow) REDCap will be down after normal business hours (5:30 pm to 8:30 pm) for planned maintenance. We apologize for the short notice. We have some functionality issues that need to be addressed via a database improvement and a REDCap Upgrade. Additionally, REDCap will be upgraded to 9.1.3.
Highlights of what this REDCap update means for REDCap users and researchers
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.).
Design Update
- Improvement: The rich text editors on the Survey Settings page have now been updated to a newer version of the TinyMCE package.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 will still use the older version of the rich text editor because they 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.
- 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, especially on the left-hand project menu and left-hand Control Center menu.
- 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 the user only has access to one of these pages, they will simply not see the other page/tab.
eConsent Updates and Improvements
- 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 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.
- 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.
Bug Fix
- Major bug fix: When a project is using a public survey that has "Save & Return Later" enabled with "Allow respondents to return without needing a return code" enabled, then if a participant clicks the "Save & Return Later" button on the public survey and leaves the survey open on the "Your survey responses were saved!" page while another participant partially or fully completes the survey, and then if the original participant clicks the "Continue Survey Now" button on the "Your survey responses were saved!" page, then the original participant will mistakenly create a brand new record/response whenever they submit a survey page again after returning.
Previous Updates
REDCap Update User Summary
REDCap will be down for a planned outage from 5:00pm to 6:00pm EDT on Wednesday, March 15th. We will be updating to REDCap 8.10.2
Highlights of what this REDCap update means for REDCap users and researchers
REDCap Report Improvements
New feature: Report Folders
New feature: “Edit Access” for reports
New feature: Report search
Improvement: A project's Record ID field can now be used as a Live Filter in any given report, thus allowing users to easily view the report for a single record.
Improvement: When exporting a report, a new “Data formatting options” section appears in the export dialog to allow users to choose the CSV delimiter character to be used in CSV Raw Data and CSV Labels exports.
Improvement: When exporting a report, a new “Data formatting options” section appears in the export dialog to allow users to optionally force all numbers into a specified decimal format.
New report option that will combine checkbox options into a single column of only the checked-off options. Previously, any checkbox fields in a report would have their choices represented as separate columns in the report, but with this new setting, they can now all be represented as a single column with comma-delimited values and comma-delimited labels.
Report description – Users may now optionally set a description for a report
Change: When exporting a report, it now includes the report’s title as part of the resulting export files’ file name.
Smart Variable Integration Continues
Improvement: Smart Variables are now able to be utilized in Data Quality rule logic. Note: In many cases, Smart Variables in the logic may cause Data Quality rules to take much longer to complete, which is due to the fact that the logic has to be re-evaluated for *every* item being processed by the DQ rule, whereas normally the logic only needs to be evaluated just once at the beginning of when the DQ rule is executed.
Improvement: Data Quality rule H (i.e., "Incorrect values for calculated fields") and auto-calcs (i.e., the process of calc fields being triggered by data imports or cross-form/cross-event calculations) can now handle Smart Variables that are used inside calculated field equations. In previous versions, such calc fields could only successfully run while on a data entry form or survey page.
Performance Boost
Improvement/bug fix: In previous versions, it was very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to create reports with lots of fields in projects that contained >1000 total fields. In some cases, it would cause the Create Report page to be very sluggish or even to crash in some cases. This should no longer happen, and users should be able to easily create reports with thousands of fields, if they wish, with no problem.
Improvement: Performance boost – Certain pages in projects with thousands or more records should now load much faster in most cases. This includes the Record Status Dashboard, various pages utilizing Data Access Groups, and certain reports. Reports A and B should especially see significantly faster loading (excluding when viewing “all” pages in report A or B).
Misc. Notable Improvements
Bug fix: In REDCap Messenger, it might display that there are unread messages for the user to read even though there are none.
Improvement: When selecting a color for an item under "Custom survey theme options" on the Survey Settings page, the color-picker now allows users to provide the Hex color code (e.g., #0b5394) to choose the color of the item.
Improvement: A new "Filter by event" option was added to the Logging page:
New feature: PROMIS Batteries – 15 batteries of instruments are now available in the REDCap Shared Library.
API Improvements
Change/improvement: Super API Tokens can now be used for the "Export REDCap Version" API method. In previous versions, only project-level API tokens could be used for this method. This will allow users to be able to obtain the REDCap version number outside the context of a project.
New API method: “Import Repeating Instruments and Events” – Allows users to import a list of the repeated instruments and repeating events for a project as a means of setting which instruments and events should be repeatable.
REDCap Update User Summary
REDCap will be down for a planned outage from5:00pm to7:00pm EDT onMonday October 8th. We will be updating to REDCap 8.5.13.
Highlights of what this REDCap update means for REDCap users and researchers
New Feature: Survey-specific email invitation fields
You can designate any email field in your project to use for sending survey invitations for that particular survey. Thus, you can collect several email addresses (e.g., for a student, a parent, and a teacher) and utilize each email for a different survey in the project. Then you can send each person an invitation to their own survey, after which all the survey responses get stored as one single record in the project. To learn more about Survey-specific email invitation fields click here
New Feature: Smart Variables
Smart Variables are dynamic variables (from a predefined list of 32 that can be found here) that can be used in calculated fields, conditional/branching logic, and piping. Similar to using project variable names inside square brackets - e.g., [heart_rate], Smart Variables are also represented inside brackets - e.g., [user-name], [survey-link], [previous-event-name][weight], or [heart_rate][previous-instance]. But instead of pointing to data fields, Smart Variables are context-aware and thus adapt to the current situation. Some can be used with field variables or other Smart Variables, and some are meant to be used as stand-alone. There are many possibilities. Smart Variables can reference things with regard to users, records, forms, surveys, events/arms, or repeating instances. To learn more about Smart Variables click here
New Feature: Improved e-Consent Framework:
New e-consent tools including an extra certification page, better consent review workflow and PDF saving tools, and improved signature box look and workflow. As an optional tool, additional e-consent values (i.e., name, date of birth, IP Address, etc.) can be added to the PDF as extra documentation of the identity of the person who is consenting. Improved e-signature workflow and look. To learn more about e-Consent Framework click here
New Feature: PDF Auto-Archiver
Upon survey completion, a compact PDF copy of the survey response can be automatically stored in the project's File Repository, from which the archived PDFs can be downloaded at any time.
Improvement: SQL fields can utilize Smart Variables
Utilizing Smart Variables in SQL fields can be very powerful because they allow the query to be truly dynamic and change from context to context or record to record, rather than it always being a static query that gets executed against the database.
Bug fix: Twilio Participant Preference Selection with DateDiff logic
When using the Twilio telophony module for sending survey invitations while also using Automated Survey Invitations that contain conditional logic containing datediff+today or datediff+now, if the ASI has "Participant Preference" as the invitation type, then in certain cases (but not all the time) it would mistakenly send the invitation via email rather than via the participant's preferred delivery method. And if those participants do not have an associated email address, then the invitation would simply fail to send, as noted in the Survey Invitation Log.
To see a full list of new features and bug fixes please click here.
Have questions? Please attend a workshop to ask questions and have a discussion about a specific issue or attend a training to see a presentation covering the basics. All users can be found at: CCTST Events
Full List of Updates and Bug Fixes
Overview
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