Copying & pasting answers

Through the various menus (in the upper-right corner and each card of a Q&A), users can copy & paste answers.This is a very useful feature that is usually trivial to use. Nevertheless, there are some caveats to watch out for.

Location matters

Which menu is used, has a huge impact on what is being copied or pasted.

From/to Assemble Document

When answers are copied that are bound to datafields, you can also copy from / paste to the Data Dashboard of Assemble Document. Be aware, however, that Q&A answers are not necessarily bound to datafields — but those that are not, are simply ignored.

Matching answers between Q&As

Copy/pasting will be trivial when a user opens two different answer-sets of the same underlying Q&A, and performs any of the available copy/paste operations. In such situation, Clause9 can easily match each answer between the source Q&A and target Q&A, on the basis of the internal (invisible) question-number, as saved in Clause9's database server.

However, if a Q&A is duplicated, then all the questions of the duplicated Q&A get new (invisible) numbers in the database, because those questions will be completely independent from the original questions. Accordingly, the matching on the basis of the invisible question-numbers will fail.

It gets even more difficult when you try to copy/paste answers between Q&As that were independently created, but happen to have similarly-phrased questions. From the end-user’s perspective, it should be possible to copy/paste answers between such Q&As.

Clause9 therefore applies the following steps to match answers between Q&As:

• First, Clause9 will try to match on the invisible question-number. (As stated above, this will only succeed when copy/pasting between answer-sets of the samen underlying Q&A.)

• Next, Clause9 will try to match on the question’s identifier, as specified in the question’s options. If two questions have the same identifier (and have the same answer-type and answer-amount), then this will be seen as a match.

When you are juggling with multiple identifiers in the same Q&A, you may want to have a look at either the Identifiers pane or the Checks pane to manage those identifiers (e.g., to detect inadvertent duplicates).

• If the identifier matching also fails, Clause9 will try to match on the basis of the following combination of elements:

  • the card’s title (in the current language of the Q&A’s interface)

  • the question’s title (in the same language)

  • the answer-type

  • the answer-amount (single vs. multiple answers possible)

    In other words, if a question in the target-Q&A has the same title as the question in the source-Q&A, and the titles of the cards they are situated in also correspond, there will be match.

• Finally, questions can match on the basis of a corresponding datafield bound to them.

No validations performed

Be aware that Clause9 currently does not perform any of the validations that may be associated with questions in the target Q&A. Accordingly, be aware that when users copy/paste between disparate Q&As, “invalid” answers may end up in the target Q&A.

First match only

As soon as a match is found, Clause9 will use that question to paste the answer. This means that when multiple questions can potentially match, only the first match will be used, so that subsequent matches get ignored. (Clause9 runs through the matches in the order of the questions.)

Tables

Keep in mind that in a Q&A, a table-based answer consists of multiple repeating-list-datafields. Accordingly:

• if you copy a table from the Q&A to Assemble Document, multiple separate datafields may get targeted

• copying a repeating-list-datafield from Assemble Document to Q&A is currently not supported

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Using Launch Q&A questions

Instead of using the menu, you can also automate launching Q&As (and immediately copying all matching answers) by inserting Launch Q&A questions. This enables you, as the template author, to create easy-to-use facilities for end-users to create closely linked documents.