The Interview Service tier manages connections, handles respondent authentication, reads and writes case data on the Data Service tier using the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model, manages the list of published projects and their status, allows activation of projects, and produces HTML pages and passes them to the Web Service.

The Interview Service tier consists of the following main components:

Manages the creation of new interviews and acts as an interface between the other components of the Interview Service tier. See Interviewer Session engine for more information.

Executes the interview script and controls what happens during each interview. See Interview scripting for information about writing and testing interview scripts and Interview Object model for technical details about the object model.

Stores information about active and recently used projects. See Project Cache for more information.

A repository for interview data that can be used for restarting timed out or stopped interviews and for rolling back active interviews when the respondent or interviewer snaps back to a previous question. See Value cache for more information.

Provides autodialing facilities for telephone interviewing projects. See Dialer Interface component for more information.

Implements sample management in the projects that require it. See Sample management for more information.

Used by the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer Project Management ASPs to manage the settings and configuration for all projects in the system. For more information, see Distributed Property Management (DPM). The Interviewer Session Engine uses the DPM Server component, mrDPMServer3.exe, for obtaining project properties from the DPM repository. If the project uses sample management, authentication of prospective respondents is also run inside this component.

Certain parts of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer use a fixed-length buffer of 14 characters to store server names. The string must be terminated by a null character, so server names of up to 13 characters are always valid. Server names longer than 13 characters might therefore cause problems with DPM.

Reads the questionnaire script from the .mdd file and controls the writing of case data to the database. For more information, see UNICOM Intelligence Data Model.