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Publish and preview an assessment

Purpose​

Turn a template into something a participant can open, check it yourself first, and take it down again when the round closes.

Who this is for​

Account administrators and campaign managers.

Before you start​

  • A campaign to put it in. See Create a campaign.
  • A template with a usable question schema. The Assessments sidebar item is the template library; global templates supplied by the platform work as they are, local templates need to have been built or imported. See Import and export templates as JSON.

Add the assessment to the campaign​

  1. Open the campaign and choose Add assessment in the header.
  2. In Assessment Info, set the display Order, the Assessment Title and a description.
  3. In Admin:
    • Included in Campaign — shown as the campaign's own name when the dialog was opened from inside that campaign (there is nothing else to choose); a picker only appears where the dialog can genuinely address more than one campaign.
    • Based on Assessment Template — pick the template.
    • Publish State — Draft, Active or Completed.
    • Public Deployment Key — leave blank and it is generated when you publish, or type your own. Keys must be unique across the platform; a clash is reported as "This public deployment key is already in use."
    • Who Answers and Default Availability — see Who answers, and whether they have to.
  4. Under the English description, add the respondent-facing description in any other language the account has enabled (Settings › Languages) — see Describing the assessment to respondents, per language.
  5. In Features, switch on what this assessment should offer: Auditor Validation Button, Item Analytics, Auditor Notes.
  6. In Labels, filter by group and tick the labels that classify this assessment.
  7. Save. The dialog's body scrolls; Save and Cancel stay put in the footer at any window height.

The assessment appears under Active deployments on the campaign overview, in either table or card view.

The assessment appears under Active deployments on the campaign overview, in either table or card view.

Who answers, and whether they have to​

Two settings in Admin decide how this assessment behaves inside its campaign. Who Answers is the unit of participation: each participant answers for themselves (the default, and what every existing assessment does), one answer per organisation, or one answer per group — where the group is named by one of the account's label groups, such as Department or Project. On the last two, one completed response covers everyone in that organisation or group, and any participant attached to it may open and finish it. Default Availability is what a participant sees before any rule fires: Mandatory (it counts towards being finished), Optional (offered, never chased) or Hidden (shown only when a rule says so). New and existing assessments are mandatory unless you say otherwise, which is what the roster's completion counts have always assumed.

Both settings belong to the campaign's structure once that structure is published. If the campaign has a published graph, the two fields are shown but greyed out, with a line saying which published version is in force — change them in the campaign graph and publish it again, and every assessment the graph names is updated together. Everything else in this dialog stays editable; only these two move.

Separately, Who Answers stops being editable — with its own explanation — the moment this assessment has even one submission, whether or not a graph governs it: changing who a response belongs to after people have already answered would orphan those responses or silently re-key them to a unit nobody chose. Default Availability carries no such lock and can still be changed at any time.

Describing the assessment to respondents, per language​

The English description (under Assessment Info) is what every respondent sees unless their resolved language has its own text. Below it, the dialog offers one more textarea per language your account has enabled beyond English — save one there and a respondent whose language resolves to it sees that text instead on their landing page and before they open the survey; anyone else still sees the English base. These fields only appear once the assessment has been saved once (there is nothing yet to attach a translation to); reopen it to add or edit them.

Publish it​

In the deployments table, choose Publish on the row. That sets its status to Active and generates the public key if it does not have one. Until then the Public key / link column reads "No key (publish to activate)".

Publishing can be refused, and the message tells you why:

MessageWhat to do
Select an assessment template before publishing.Open Settings on the row and choose a template.
The selected template no longer exists. Select another template.Pick another template.
The selected template has no publish-ready schema yet.Finish building the template before deploying it.
This public deployment key is already in use. Choose a different key.Choose a different key.

Preview it​

Two controls, and they are not the same thing:

  • Test on the deployment row opens the live participant page in a new tab. It is only enabled once the assessment is Active and has a key — it is a check of the real thing, not a sandbox. Anything you submit through it is a real submission.
  • The key in the Public key / link column copies the participant URL (https://<host>/a/<KEY>) to your clipboard. If the browser blocks clipboard access, the URL is shown so you can copy it by hand.

Open the copied link in a private window to see what a participant with no session sees.

Close it again​

Choose Unpublish on the row. The status returns to Draft and the public link stops resolving — participants who open it get "This assessment is not available", not an error page. Republishing reuses the same key.

Set the status to Completed in assessment Settings when a round is finished and you want that stated rather than merely closed.

What happens next​

  • Responses arrive as submissions and appear in the campaign's Total Submissions and Completion Rate.
  • Participants can leave and come back: the participant page autosaves and resumes from the same browser.
  • The small chart icon at the end of each deployment row opens per-assessment analytics.

Limits and gotchas​

  • A published assessment inside a Draft campaign is still not reachable by participants. Set the campaign Active too.
  • Delete on a deployment row is permanent, and is confirmed in the app's own dialog reading Delete assessment "X"? This cannot be undone. — not a browser prompt.
  • The public assessment link is unauthenticated by design. Anyone who has the key can answer. If you need to know who answered, invite participants and use the participant-scoped link rather than sharing the bare key.