Signals

Signals have no meaning to the interviewing program. Instead, they pass information about the outcome of an interview back to the sample management system. The sample management script will have been set up to recognize certain signal values and will define the actions to be carried out on sample records returned from interviews with each signal value. For example, a sample record for a completed interview may be transferred to a queue of records for completed interviews so that it cannot be selected again on the current project, whereas a record for an interview that has been stopped may be transferred to a stopped queue to await restart.

You can use whatever values you like as signals and can assign them whatever meanings suit your company’s requirements. As long as the interview and sample management scripts use the same values everything will work well. (Note, however, that in telephone interviewing projects, you may need to update some of the reports if you change the meanings of some signals. The interview scripting program has a set of predefined signals that are used by the standard sample management scripts that come with the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library. These values are defined as constants in the Signals type definition:

Signal name	Value	Meaning
sigCompleted	1	A completed interview. The respondent has answered all applicable questions.
sigStopped	2	Interview stopped by the respondent clicking Stop or by a statement in the interview script.
sigError	4	Interview terminated due to an error in the script. See Writing your own error handler for an example of how to use this signal.
sigOverQuota	5	Interview terminated by quota control. This happens when all the quota cells that a respondent belongs in are full.
sigEarlyComplete	6	An interview that should be treated as a completed interview even though the respondent may not have answered all applicable questions. You might decide to flag interviews in this way if respondents have completed at least 80% of the survey.
sigFailedScreener	7	The interview failed at a screener question.