How Auto Answer works
UNICOM Intelligence Professional will choose a valid answer for each question based on the definition of the question in the metadata section of your interview script. For example, if you have specified a valid range of 10 to 20 for a numeric question, UNICOM Intelligence Professional randomly chooses a number from that range. If no valid range has been specified, UNICOM Intelligence Professional chooses any valid value for the type of question.
Text questions are treated slightly differently. UNICOM Intelligence Professional creates an answer consisting of part or all of a standard phrase, which is repeated as many times as required to fill the answer. If the length of the text question is specified (or implied) as a range, the length of the answer is any value in that range. If a fixed length has been specified, the length of the answer is that value.
If a non-categorical question includes factors, one of the factor values is chosen at random. If any type of question includes special responses such as Don’t Know and Not Answered, UNICOM Intelligence Professional might choose one of those responses as an answer.
In the following situations, UNICOM Intelligence Professional might generate an invalid answer:
▪When a question contains a validation expression, because expressions are ignored.
▪When a question contains a range expression that consists of two or more ranges, for example 10..20, 40..50. Only the lowest and highest values in the expression are observed, so that in this example UNICOM Intelligence Professional will generate any answer between 10 and 50.
In these situations, you can specify
hints to reduce the range of answers that UNICOM Intelligence Professional can choose from. For more information, see
Using hints.
Because UNICOM Intelligence Professional is unable to generate a year value that begins with a 0, it never chooses an answer earlier than 01-Jan-1000, even if the specified or implied range for a date question includes earlier dates. In addition, if the range expression for a date question specifies a maximum date earlier than 01-Jan-1000, an invalid answer is generated.
See also