Banners are the usual way to display non-question text on the interview screen. The text is defined in the metadata section of the interview script using an info item (see Defining information texts), and can consist of plain text and variables whose current values are to be substituted in the text when it is displayed. In the routing section, you add the banner text to the question or page to which it relates so that it can be displayed by the Ask statement that presents the page or question.

You can add banners at two levels:

You can display more than one banner at each level.

Each banner belonging to a question or page has a name and a text, rather like a question in the metadata section. When you add a banner, you define its name and specify the name of the info item that contains the banner text. You can give every banner a unique name in the routing section, but if you use templates and want to refer to banners in some more general way, it is more likely that you will create one or maybe two banners per level, and simply update their contents from different info items as and when required.

For example, if the interview script has three sections, you may want to display the section name at the top of each page. Instead of defining three different banners and only displaying one at a time, it is better to define a single banner and change its text as the respondent reaches the start of each new section in the interview. This allows you to use the same template for all sections rather than needing three templates with different banner names in them.

In the default template, all page banners are displayed at the top of the page before all of the questions, and the question banners are displayed above the question they are associated with. You can change where and how banners are displayed by defining your own template. For more information, see Templates.