The DDL includes example scripts that support automated installation, uninstallation, and Docker installations. For more information, see Scripted installation and uninstallation.

A single licensing activation code can be used for multiple interviewers using the Interviewer software. For more information, see the UNICOM Licensing manual.

For information the latest system requirements for UNICOM Intelligence, see the new Knowledge Base article, K34-1453.

The Build and Survey Tabulation applications have been updated to support all the browsers that are listed in this article.

The EvaluateGridSummary function makes it easier to create variables that show the number of respondents that chose a specified response for a grid iteration; for example, a Top 2 variable showing the number of respondents who gave a positive answer for each iteration of a grid. EvaluateGridSummary is particularly useful when per‑element bases are required for tabulating the percentage of respondents choosing that response using a base of those respondents who gave a response for the grid iteration.

The function is only useful when using the up-lev operator, for example:

For more information, see EvaluateGridSummary.

Multiple aggregation components running in parallel now use separate connections to the underlying data file. This gives better performance when using multiple CPUs for Reporter or tables scripting.

Other applications that want to use a separate file access for each connection can set the ConnectionPerCommand custom property. For more information, see:

Exporting Excel tables is now significantly faster. To see the improvement, clear Use Excel automation in the Export Tables dialog.

To make projects with very large numbers of questions load faster in Survey Tabulation, use the LoadVariableInstances property. It avoids loading the entire set of variable instances for grids and loops. Create the LoadVariableInstances property at the top level for the project, by using the Interviewer Server Administration - Project Editor, and then set its value to False. This enables the project to load, but you cannot add grids or loops to the table by using the variable list.

Interview startup and page display time have been improved for projects with large database questions.

Quota performance for Personal interviewing has been improved. Quotas synchronize more quickly, and the Interviewer user interface displays the quota pane more quickly.

Quota performance through the Quota Web Service has been improved. Retrieving information for projects with a large number of quota cells is faster.

The load balancing script now includes an IsCachedInterview property to load balancing existing interviews to the original engine. For more information, see Default UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer load balancing script.

This allows clusters that use the “OnStartCheckForExistingInterview” feature to return the last page of an existing interview when a second start request is received for the same respondent. For more information, see Restarting active surveys.

The SPSS Statistics SAV DSC can now read or write zsav files that are compressed by using the IBM SPSS Statistics ZCOMPRESS keyword. Files compressed with this compression type occupy the least disk space. For information on ZCOMPRESS, see the IBM SPSS Statistics documentation.

You can now protect specific Participant fields so that only authorized users can access them.

When you protect a field, its values are encrypted in the database. The values are automatically decrypted when needed, for example, for Interviewers and Reviewers working with a specific Participant record and for users of Participants that have been assigned the ability to view protected fields.

For more information, see Restricting access to specific participant fields.

For the most up-to-date security coverage, use SSL with TLS 1.2. SSL with TLS 1.0 is no longer considered secure. For more information, see Security considerations.

A new AllowXHTMLParameters option has been added to the Web.config file for the mrIWeb component.

To set up Phone Participants and Review Interviews in the DMZ, use the following parameters in the web.Config file:

To set up Phone Participants or Review Interviews to run in the DMZ, set these properties in the web.Config file:

To restrict access to the images displayed in interviews so that respondents cannot reference those images outside the surveys, use the new “TrustedDomain” value in the web.config. It restricts requests for images to image URLs embedded in the HTML pages of interviews only.

For more information, see Restricting access to images that are served by the image cache.

For more information, see UNICOM Intelligence web player and W3C compliance.

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is required by Reporter if you use the IBM SPSS Visualization engine for charting. If you use a different charting engine, or the JRE has been installed manually, you can disable the automatic download of the JRE, so that you do not have to click Cancel every time you start Reporter. To do this, set the new DisableJavaDownload property in the application settings for Reporter. For more information, see Configuration setting for Reporter.

A new ProfileTablesDisabled option has been added to the access.xml file that controls Reporter and Survey Tabulation access.

For more information, see Access definition file.

The UNICOM Intelligence Function Library includes some functions that are intended for scripting, but are not intended for use in Data Model queries, for example: ShellExecute, CreateObject, InputBox, and Sleep. To ensure that these functions are not called by Data Model queries (which might cause security issues), add the ScriptOnlyFunctions registry setting to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SPSS\MR Function Library\mrFuncLib. It contains a list of functions that should not be available to the Data Model.

For more information, see Script only functions.

For an overview of the security practices used in the development process, see Secure engineering practices.

For information about best practice when using the Question and Routing pages, see Using the Question and Routing panes.

The Template Creation Wizard in the Author and Professional Gallery under Functionality has been replaced. The new version creates a template that uses UNICOM UX4 technology for better usability and responsiveness, and provides more control of layout, including color schemes.

A mrIWeb Web.config configuration item, ImageCacheUsePaths, has been added to support references to relative URLs from css files. For more information, see ImageCacheUsePaths.

A UseRelativeReferences option has been added to HTMLOptions to allow the mrRef reference to be used with the relative path to the sub-template location. You can set HTMLOptions in the metadata document (see HTMLOptions custom property) or the mrIWeb web.Config file (see Web service configuration).

Some updates have been made to make HTML Control integration more complete and usable:

A ValueFormat parameter has been added to the mrData section of the template XML. For more information, see mrData Element.

The jQuery calendar control has been updated to support localized format using the parameter.

The Author wizard now supports updating the target metadata document. For more information, see Creating the wizard.

The Professional user interface makes better use of the latest video drivers; improves performance, especially when scrolling large files; and improves cursor positioning on long lines of script.

For more information about using external browsers to find and resolve errors, see Testing interview scripts.

Microsoft Access mdb and Excel files for database questions are better supported on the server. The advantage of these file types is they are easy to deploy when implementing multiple database questions. The new stability features depend on dummy .mdb file:

Do not remove this file.

The %PROJECT_DIRECTORY% macro and Document.ProjectDirectory property have been updated to better support multi-cluster environments. For more information, see Database questions.

A new method called IOM.CommitCaseData() enables the routing script to force new response values to be immediately written into the database. This might be useful when, for example, you use the Interview Web Service to call an interview function that updates a question response. This response would not normally be written until the respondent moves to the next page.

IOM.CommitCaseData() takes effect only if AutoUpdateDataModel is 1.

If AutoUpdateDataModel is 0, there is no connection to the database during the interview and responses are only written if and when the interview completes.

If AutoUpdateDataModel is 2, all responses are written immediately to the database without using IOM.CommitCaseData().

In some interviewing scenarios, you might want to mark an interview as “early complete” if the respondent stops the interview or if the interview is left to timeout. This can happen if all questions relating to the core interview have completed and the remaining questions are only informational or relating to a follow-up interview. In this situation, the respondent may consider the interview is complete and close their browser, causing the interview to eventually timeout, instead of continuing to the end of the routing script.

An IOM.MarkAsCompleteOnExit property has been added.

If it is set to True, when the respondent stops the interview or the interview times out the interview is be marked as “early complete”. Depending on the sample management script used this means that:

The default value is False.

To encrypt or decrypt strings, use these new functions:

Encryption can require a Base64‑encoded string. To encode and decode strings, see Base64Encode and Base64Decode.

Functions have been added to de‑serialize JSON strings into a Properties collections and other types and to serialize a types into a JSON string. These are useful for interacting with web services that use JSON.

For more information, see JsonSerialize and JsonDeserialize.

A new ServerVariables property has been added to IOM.Info. This can be used to retrieve information from the HTTP request headers for web interviews. For example, these properties can be used to retrieve the IP address of the respondent either in the REMOTE_ADDR field or in the HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR depending on the setup of the server and firewall.

For a list of the ServerVariables, see IOM.Info.ServerVariables.

To turn off this feature, see Web service configuration

Substitutions can be used to make email invitation and reminders more personal and relevant. Conditional substitutions enhance this feature as words and phrases can be switched in or out based on sample fields without the sample fields having to actually contain those words or phrases.

For more information, see Conditional insertion in emails and phone participants introductory text.

In the Email activity, a new substitution has been added that will include the survey URL plus the authentication fields. The new substitution is called “Survey URL with authentication fields”.

By default, the value in the “Write date and time that email was sent into sample field named” list must be unique across all email jobs for a project. The field is checked for a value before sending an email, so this uniqueness check ensures that an email can be sent both an invitation and a reminder. However, if you do not want to use uniqueness, set EnableDuplicateStampFieldCheck to False.

For more information, see Settings for the Email activity.

Phone Participants and Review Interviews can now be installed in the Web tier.

Call recording can now be controlled from the interview script for phone interviewing. For more information, see _Interviewer intrinsic.

Preview records are displayed to the interviewer, instead of being automatically dialed. A dialog appears that says: “Please preview the contact information then choose 'Start Dialing' to make the call.” If all records are previewed, this dialog is irrelevant, so you can prevent it from appearing: see Disabling the preview dial dialog.

Multi-number dialing is used when more than one number should be tried for a respondent. This could mean calling a respondent’s home phone, mobile phone, work phone, and any other numbers. Each number is tried in turn, based on a set of rules implemented in the sample management script. Multi-number dialing is also known as horizontal dialing.

For more information, see Multi-number dialing.

Call blending supports both inbound and outbound calls where the dialer used supports inbound calling. An example where inbound calling might be used is when an interviewer leaves a message for a candidate participant, and then the candidate calls in to take an interview.

For more information, see Call blending: Supporting inbound and outbound calls.

Call transfer is now integrated for dialers that support the feature. There are new features in Interviewing Options, Phone Participants, Interviewer Monitoring, and impacts to Interviewing reports and User Administration.

Interviewer includes these usability improvements:

It can be useful to start an interview from within an interview. For example, you might have a primary project that is used to decide which other project is best for a respondent, or you might want to run the second project multiple times for a single respondent. This is similar to chaining (see Chaining projects for phone (CATI) interviews), but implemented slightly differently for Interviewer. In Interviewer, the chained project is started from the interview script rather than from the sample management script. The primary Interviewer console remains on screen but is disabled. Once the chained project completes, the primary Interviewer console is available again.

For more information, see Starting a new interview from within an interview.

New web services have been added for better support of custom applications. The data returned is based on the access permissions of the user.

You can now create a table of contents worksheet. See the Advanced Excel Export Properties dialog.

A new Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG) charting option is available for displaying and exporting HTML charts, instead of static chart images. To use this feature, select the Jscript Chart Engine in Reporter.

You can now define rules for OK, Warning, and Error status values: use the new “Define conditional highlighting” wizard in the Reporter Library. When the table is populated, G (OK), Y (Warning), and R (Error) letters are added to the cells, and they are highlighted accordingly.

This feature is made possible by a new CellItem, Status (itStatus), to support highlighting cells. A FormatExpression sets the Status of the cell, and then a new TableDocument.StatusStyles collection sets up CSS classes for each Status value. A stylesheet can then be used to format cells. For example, to set up a Red/Yellow/Green status, create a Status CellItem with the following FormatExpression:

A new StatusStyles property has been added to the TOM Document to set up a collection of status styles.

These styles carry through to the HTML and Microsoft Office exports allowing for highlighted cells.

For more information see Highlighting cells: Status cell item.

The DefinedValues function returns a value from a list of values based on the current rotation state. You can use it to specify static data for a table. For example, the following syntax adds a row and column of normative values:

For more information, see DefinedValues.

The new MakeArray function creates an array of values based on the parameters passed. For example:

For more information, see MakeArray.

SPSS .sav output files can be written using multiple code pages by adding MR Init Custom = "SavCodePage=65001;" to the output connection string. For more information, see Language handling by the SPSS Statistics SAV DSC.

Interviewers and others with access to the “Review Interviews” activity can change responses for quality control purposes. You can now make interviews “read‑only”, either for all users or selected users.

For more information, see Configuring Review Interviews to be read-only.

The “Reset all complete counts to 0” button on the Quota Actions toolbar in the Interviewer Server Administration Quotas activity has been updated to clarify its purpose.

A new feature has been added to User Administration for the Quotas activity, “Allow resetting completes to 0”. This feature is assigned by default to only the FieldManager role.

A new mrIWeb Web.config configuration item, ImageCacheUsePaths, has been added to support references to relative URLs from css files. For more information, see Web service configuration.

If a sample field name is mistyped, it might not match the interviewer qualification. In earlier versions, UNICOM Intelligence did not report this as an error; it only wrote a warning in the log file. This mean that interviewer qualifications could be silently ignored.

In this version, the default sample management script now exits without returning records. If you want to use the previous behavior, see Scripts in the CATI folder.

Reporter can now write a backup to an alternate destination. For more information, see Configure Reporter to save local .mtd files to avoid issues with unreliable networked disks.

The source for the WordCapture accessory has been added to the DDL at: