5.8 Taking over treatment roles during testing

1 Introduction

In testing, you have to deal with the following two issues.

1. You want to be able to test the entire route yourself incl.the emails included in it.
2. You don’t want to bother other people with emails and forms.

There is a simple way to accomplish this.

In the route, make sure all users at treatment steps and email recipients are based on fields from the form. During testing, you can then modify the relevant fields to suit yourself.

2 Methods

One-time

In your own LeanForms environment, create a group “ZZZtest” once. Exactly what name you give it doesn’t matter as long as you make sure it appears alphabetically at the bottom of the list of all groups. This is to prevent the group from not replacing the normal group. More on this later. When someone starts testing, add this user to this group.

Basic Steps

Create a dropdown of type “Group” or “Person of Group” for each practitioner or email recipient in the route.

• Group: for treatment step of type Group
• Person from group: for treatment step User

For each treatment step, under Source, select ‘Value from form’ and assign the appropriate dropdown.

Group

To the groups shown in the drop-down list, add the group ZZZtest. It will appear at the bottom of the list.

Person from group

For a dropdown of type Person from group, you can add yourself to the appropriate group to be chosen from at the time of testing and then choose yourself when completing the test form. You can use your own user for this.

To prevent people from putting “live” forms in your name (they see your name in the list as well), you can choose to use a testuser for testing with a clear name indicating that it is a tester. Moreover, if you name this user e.g. ZZZtestuser, it will appear at the bottom of the dropdown list. It is your own choice whether that is desirable, but not necessary.

Automatically populated dropdown

When ‘initial blank’ is off, a dropdown is automatically populated with the first value in the dropdown list. If there is only 1 item in the list, this is a convenient way to hide the query from the user, but use it in the route. There are 2 possible situations.

• The handler is always a certain role, such as QA manager or HR manager.
  Instead of assigning this role directly in the treatment step, we create a dropdown that has this role as the default value.
  Tip: link the dropdown to the function (=group) and not to the person!
• Conditional dropdown based on a previous query where each condition has only 1 result.

Add the test group to each dropdown. Note that with a conditional dropdown, you must do this for each condition.

‘Handler steps’ chapter.

To keep it organized, create a “Handler Steps” section at the bottom of your form. Place in it all dropdowns that the user does not need to fill in or see. Put permissions on this chapter so that only the group ZZZtest sees this chapter. Someone who is going to test should be part of the group ZZZtest and then automatically see this chapter.

In the first step in the route, choose test group or testuser in all treatment dropdowns. Then you can send the form all the way through the route with yourself everywhere as a handler and recipient of emails.

For dropdowns hidden from the user, it is essential that the name of the test group or test user is alphabetically under the normal group/user to ensure that in the normal forms of the active version, the correct handler is automatically chosen (by default, the first value from the list is always chosen).

Active version and revisions

Adding groups to a dropdown of type Group, can only be done when a form is in revision.

You can leave the extra groups for hidden fields in the active version anyway, because no one sees them. For the dropdowns that do need to be filled in by the user, it is your own choice whether to leave the test groups. Our advice is to do so. Then they are always available, even for a test with an active form and you don’t have to add them every time you test a new revision and remove them again before activating the form. If the names of the test group are clear and are listed alphabetically at the bottom they will not be inconvenienced.

Of course, adding/removing a test user to a group associated with treatment dropdowns of type ‘Person from group’ is always possible. There is no need to revise the form for this.