Every project and interview has a collection of properties that store information about the project or interview. For projects, the properties include the project name, its type (interview or analysis), and the names of the standard pages to display for authentication, interview completion, and so on. Interview properties include the interviewer's ID, and whether this is a test interview. You can read and sometimes change project and interview properties in the routing section of the questionnaire script or in the sample management script.

With the exception of the Status property, all properties are stored in the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server properties collection; for example, in Agent.Server.Project["museum"].Properties["mrInterview"] for the museum project.

The majority of project properties are created when the project is created. The list of properties to create and their default settings are taken from Properties Interviewer Server (Data Collection).xml in C:\InetPub\wwwroot\SPSSMR\ProjectEditor\Settings, or the equivalent if UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server was not installed to the default website. The file used depends on the project's type. Other project properties, such as those related to CATI, sample management, and quota control usage, are created when the project is activated.

You can edit the values of a project's properties or add customized properties to projects using the Edit Project activity in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin.

To minimize calls to DPM, project properties are normally re-cached once every 60 seconds. This means that you may see a small delay between changing a property and the change taking effect. You can alter the frequency with which properties are re-cached by changing the ProjectPropertiesTimeout setting in the registry. For more information, see Project cache settings.

In sample management, project properties are available through the ProjectProperties collection; for example:

Interview properties are predefined parameters used to control the creation and execution of the interview. They can be set on the URL that starts the interview or, if the project uses sample management, in the sample management script. When specified on a URL, all interview properties can be referred to as Interview.PropertyName. This can be shortened in URLs to I.Name. For example:

can be shortened to:

Both examples start a test interview for the museum project.

In sample management, Interview properties are set via the InterviewProperties collection; for example, InterviewProperties.Item("Serial") = 123

The built-in properties are available by default, but you can pass custom properties to the interview by adding new properties to the InterviewProperties collection.

For example, to pass a property called MyProperty to the interview through the InterviewProperties collection you can use some of the sample management script helper functions as follows:

The interview properties used to create the interview are available in the interview script through IInterview.Properties. Most interview properties are also available through IInterview.Info. If you need to change interview properties once an interview has been created, you should do so using the IInterview.Info object.

Some properties exist at both the project and the interview level. In this situation, the interview property is created by copying the project property with its current value. The value of the interview property can then be changed for specific interviews by the sample management script without affecting the setting of the project property.