[Contrib: Evaluation System] If a survey is closed and then reopened it loses its original dates

[Aaron Zeckoski]

To provide the technical background here:
When a survey is forced closed the dates are adjusted so that the
closing date is set for the nearest future minute and the other dates
are adjusted to correspond. Since dates completely control the state
of an evaluation this is the only way to actually cause one to close
early.
When the evaluation is reopened the closing date would be in the past
(along with the other dates). To correct for this the system will use
the default length controls to set the initial dates and then places
the user on the page with the dates directly in front of them and
controls to adjust them.

As for the issue, I don't really see the problem here. If a user
closes the evaluation then they clearly did not care about the dates
anymore so why would they expect them to be retained? If you move an
event on your calendar do you expect it to remember all the previous
dates it was associated with?

If you have users closing and reopening evaluations a lot then perhaps
there is a reason why they are doing this. I suspect this is the real
issue.

-AZ


On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Adam Marshall
<adam.marshall at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> Aaron suggested that I ask the list's opinion on this matter.
>
> Some of our users have complained that when a survey is (temporally) closed and reopened the original closing dates are replaced by the default close date.
>
> Say today is the 17 may (which it is). Set up a survey and change the default close date (say 20 may) to be 18 June, assign it to a group and so on.
>
> Then go into the dashboard and close survey then go back and re-open. The survey close date will now NOT be 18 June but will be set to the default close date (20 may).
>
> We find this to be counter intuitive and has caused problems with people not noticing that the close date has been silently brought forward.
>
> I would propose that the original dates be kept when a survey is closed & reopened. Is there any good reason why this shouldn't be the case?
>
> Adam
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-- 
Aaron Zeckoski - Software Engineer - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile