Launch other Q&As

Clause9 allows you to launch one or more Q&As from within the current Q&A, typically for scenarios where multiple documents are closely linked and you want to reuse answers from one Q&A in a subsequent Q&A. For example, for corporate law, you may want to create an initial set of questions, and then create launch buttons to create a shareholder agreement, a set of bylaws, some governmental forms that must be completed, etc. The answers from the initial Q&A will then be copied into all those other Q&As.

Essentially, you create one or more special questions that show buttons that, when clicked, open another Q&A and automatically copy the answers of the original Q&A to that other Q&A.

Note that the Q&As that get launched will act completely independently. In other words, once the answers are copied, you can independently change the answers in the target Q&A — this will not affect the original Q&A.

Alternative: bundles

As an alternative to using launch Q&A buttons, you may want to take the approach of creating a Q&A for a Bundle of documents:

• You will typically want to use a bundle of documents when the individual subdocuments are very closely linked, i.e. when it is quite certain that several subdocuments will be used together. The Launch Q&A buttons are instead intended to combine documents that were not necessarily designed to be used together, but that nevertheless share some information and are frequently used together in practice.

• In a Q&A for a bundle of documents, you can configure in detail how the various questions & answers have to interrelate to each other. Conversely, once launched through the launch-buttons, the launched Q&As will act completely independent from the Q&A that launched them.

• In a bundle of documents, you can give the option to create one single document (PDF/DOCX), or instead a ZIP-file with separate physical files. When using launch-buttons, you create completely separate documents that are independent of each other, and will necessarily result in different physical files.

• For performance reasons you may want to envisage using the launch-buttons. When you create a Q&A for a bundle of documents, every single change to an answer will cause Clause9 to recalculate the entire bundle. This is very powerful, but may get slow when dealing with documents with hundreds of pages and hundreds of options. Conversely, separately launched Q&As will not impact each other, so when changing an answer in one Q&A, this will not impact the other Q&As.

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Step 1: Synchronising the Q&As

Usually (but not necessarily) you will want to copy all answers from one Q&A to one or more other Q&As. If so, you must make sure that copying & paste answers works correctly between all those Q&As.

When you configure a Launch Q&A question to automatically copy all answers to the launched Q&A (= the default behaviour) then this copy & paste answers functionality is used under the hood. Depending on how closely matching both Q&As are, either this can be done completely automatically, or with some manual preparation by configuring identifiers.

You will therefore want to experiment with copying & answering manually between the Q&As. When this works, pushing the Launch Q&A buttons will also work.

As you will often have to assign identifiers to questions, you may want to check out the Identifiers and Checks panes to manage identifiers and detect duplicates.

Step 2: Creating Launch Q&A buttons

You can insert dedicated Launch Q&A buttons by selecting the "Launch Q&A" kind of "question".

Next, you configure this "question" as follows:

1. In this input-box you can specify the title of the button. Note that you may want to potentially translate this title into multiple languages, by switching the language through the main toolbar of the Design Q&A module.

2. This button allows you to select the target Q&A, i.e. the Q&A that must be opened when the end-user clicks on the launch-button.

3. By default, this checkbox is activated. Occasionally you may want to uncheck this button if you don't want any answers to be copied from the host Q&A to the target Q&A.

This would then show the following button towards the end-user:

A Launch button will be hidden until a target Q&A has been assigned to it.

Step 3: Configuring the launch buttons

You may want to configure the launch buttons in various ways.

The colour of the launch button is defined by the color of the card it is hosted in. Accordingly, if you change the colour of the card through the card's options, you will also change the colour of the launch buttons in that card.

For example, in the following screenshot, the colour of the card was changed to red:

You probably also want to add multiple launching buttons. There is no limit to the number of Q&As that can be opened: simply add a separate question for each target Q&A that you want to offer to the end-user.

Each launch button can be subjected to conditions. Any condition you like can be included — e.g., you may want to hide a button until all mandatory questions have been answered, or you may want to only show a certain button when three other questions are answered in a certain way.

You may want to add help text to launch-buttons, through the launch button's options. (Alternatively, you can insert Comment or Warning questions below or above launch-questions).