Switching between Build and UNICOM Intelligence Professional

When you create a questionnaire with Build, you define the questionnaire’s contents by filling in online forms. As you do this, Build creates a questionnaire script (.mdd) file. The file has a metadata section that defines the questions and responses and a collection of routing items that specify how the questions and responses will be used in interviews (for example, the order in which questions will be asked, which questions will be asked of which respondents, and so on).

Build is designed to be easy to use and to provide facilities for creating the majority of questionnaires. There are some things that it cannot do, so you can use UNICOM Intelligence Professional to create or edit questionnaires directly in the interview scripting language. Like Build, UNICOM Intelligence Professional creates an .mdd file with a metadata section and routing information, but there are differences that you should be aware of if you use Build and UNICOM Intelligence Professional on the same questionnaire file.

▪There are some questionnaire items that you can create in UNICOM Intelligence Professional that you cannot create in Build. If you use Build on a questionnaire that contains these items, you will see them flagged as unsupported items. For more information, see Unsupported items.

▪Questionnaires created in UNICOM Intelligence Professional have a routing section that contains UNICOM Intelligence scripting code that determines how the questions in the metadata section are presented during interviews. The default routing section is called Web, but scriptwriters can create any number of different routing sections with different names if they want.

▪Questionnaires created in Build do not have a routing section. Instead, they have a collection of routing items. Only Build can write to these items. If you open a Build questionnaire in UNICOM Intelligence Professional, the application runs the mrRoutingScript DSC to translate the routing items into a routing script written in the UNICOM Intelligence scripting language. The DSC calls this routing section Paper and makes it read-only because it is a generated section rather than something that exists in the .mdd file. You will be reminded that you will need to create a new routing section (or use the default Web routing section) and copy the contents of the Paper routing into it in order to run the questionnaire. For information on how to do this in UNICOM Intelligence Professional, see ‘Adding a Routing Context’ in the UNICOM Intelligence Professional section of the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library documentation.

▪If you edit a Build questionnaire in UNICOM Intelligence Professional and you add or delete questions, the changes might not be visible in Build because UNICOM Intelligence Professional provides some functionality that is not available in Build. If you use UNICOM Intelligence Professional, and you want the questionnaire to work in Build, run the CreatePaperRouting.mrs script on the .mdd file before opening it in Build. If not, ask the original scriptwriter to do this for you. The script is installed as part of the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library in Scripts\General\mrScriptBasic.