You can test your questionnaires in UNICOM Intelligence Author by previewing individual questions or whole questionnaires. You can preview questionnaires in Web, phone, or data entry format. If you have UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper you can use it to preview the questionnaire in paper format.

You can test your questionnaire by allowing UNICOM Intelligence Author to run a preview a number of times and fill in random answers, using the Auto Answer option.

You can validate both the questionnaire file and the template file that you are using, to check for common errors. You can also view the underlying script created by UNICOM Intelligence Author, and copy it for use in other applications.

You can run all these tests on your local computer, without uploading the questionnaire to UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin. After you have tested the questionnaire on your computer, you can activate it in test mode. This uploads the questionnaire to UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin. For more information, see Activating questionnaires.

After you activate a questionnaire, either in test mode or live mode, subsequent changes are saved as new versions in the questionnaire file. This means that the changes are never deleted, which might not be what you want if you are still editing the questionnaire and correcting errors. Previewing a questionnaire is therefore a useful way of testing that the questions and responses appear as you expect them to, before activating the questionnaire.

For testing, it might be useful to initialize the SiteProperties intrinsic variable. To do this, create a file called SiteInterviewProperties.xml in the following folder:

To create the basis of this file, use DPM Explorer to export the Site.Properties.InterviewProperties collection to XML.