Hi there,

On two occasions today, someone has manually entered a reference into EPPI-Reviewer and clicked save. The reference has then not appeared on the main Documents screen in EPPI.

This also occured a few weeks ago for a couple of manually entered references. Is there any reason why this would happen?

Thanks,

Jennifer

 Dear Sergio,

Thank you for your response. I think perhaps the problem we were having (and sometimes still have on occasion) is that every now and then when we click the save button when manually entering a reference (rather than the save and close), the window closes instead. On some occasions this happens when we have not finished entering the reference and it then becomes difficult to find that reference again to finish manually entering it/coding (particularly as we have such a large number of studies). Do you think this is a networking problem?

Best,

Jennifer

Hi Jennifer,

I've looked into this is some depth and couldn't find an explanation of what you observed. This doesn't mean that there is no explanation, just that I could not understand why it may happen.
I have however a few observations to share and some "workaround" suggestions to help you handle the problem if it happens again.

Observations:
- It is very unlikely that this could be a network problem. The code does check for saving errors and/or the lack of a "saved success" confirmation message. In plain English, this means that if some error occurs while saving a new (manually created) item, EPPI-Reviewer should notice it and show some warning.
- It's easy to click "save and close" instead of "save" by mistake. I did this myself a few times while looking for bugs. Keeping in mind some basic "user experience" principles, I think this happens because the "save and close" button preceeds the (just)"save" one. The consequence is that we will swap the buttons at the next update (sometime next week): please note this, it may initially confuse an experienced user!

Workarounds: If (for whatever reason) it does happen that the new item dialog is closed on save, and you still need to edit the new item, there are plenty of ways to find the new item in just a few clicks.
1) The item is added at the end of the current list. If your list of document is still shown with the default sort (technically, the application sees the list as not-sorted), the new item will be the last one at the bottom.
2) If you had sorted the list by clicking on any column header this will show in the column header: it will have a little triangle that indicates the sorting direction. You can click the header once or twice, to make the triangle disappear, at this stage the new item should be the last of the list (as above).
3) You can also use the sorting facility to your advantage. Each item have a unique identification number (ID), if you click on the "select fields you want to display" button and activate the "Document ID" one, you'll be able to sort by that column. The new item will always have the highest ID in the current list.
4) Finally, you can also exploit the "Find:" box. Since you have just typed-in some of the Item values, you could just re-type something in there, the current list will be filtered to show only the items that contain the word you typed, might help if all of the above fails.

Armed with the strategies above, I hope that you will be able to quickly overcome the annoyance and possibly even confirm that the problem does happen. As always, it would be fantastic if you'll be able to isolate the issue and understand exactly when it does occur: the more details you'll notice, the more likely it is that I'll be able to find out what's wrong.

I hope this helps,

Sergio