Version 1.0.2
July 2024
Pete Charpentier
https://portal.redcap.yale.edu
[email protected]
The Stay Focused! external module does just three things, all meant to help you manage the situation in which you must periodically save your work as you conduct an interview or enter a long REDCap form:
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After you have clicked Save & Stay and the page reloads, the form is repositioned to the last field you entered.
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It marks the place where you left off with a bright blue horizontal bar, so that you can track how much data entry or data collection you have performed since your last save.
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It suppresses the post-save display of the popup dialog alerting you to required fields that are blank. This alert is not useful in the Save & Stay context because there will almost certainly be required but blank fields, since the data entry is in progress. More importantly, it can interrupt the flow of an interview. The post-save popup dialog will be displayed under any other Save context (Save & Exit, Save & Next Form).
In the screen shot below, the user is conducting a medical record abstraction. He has been instructed to periodically click the Save & Stay button to guard against data loss from a wobbly Internet connection.
After completing a section of the form, he decides to save his work. Here is the form before he clicks the Save & Stay button:
After he clicks Save & Stay the page refreshes as usual, but instead of the focus returning to the top of the form, the form scrolls to the same location where he left off, and identifies the last data entered with partial blue border.
Stay Focused! works by detecting non-blank data entry and clicks on special links like file upload and econsent, and remembering enough information about the last field entered to identify it after reload. The current window scroll position is also remembered, so that the window can scroll to the same location after reload. When either the bottom or the "floating" Save & Stay button is clicked, Stay Focused! Saves information about the last field entered or updated into a "localStorage" item, which is a Javascript data storage resource that persists between browser sessions. After the page is reloaded the properties of the last field is retrieved from localStorage, the form is scrolled to the proper location, and the data entry boundary is marked with a border having the same blue color as the Save&Stay button.
PLEASE NOTE
Stay Focused! makes certain assumptions about the REDCap data entry form user interface, which may change over time. There is a possibility that Stay Focused! and REDCap will drift apart at some point, due to changes in the REDCap UI. If Stay Focused! is not working for you, please get in touch with us at [email protected]. This version of Stay Focused! was tested on REDCap version 14.4.1 and LTS 14.0.32 on July 5, 2024.
| version | date | description |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.2 | 2024-07-05 | Fixes fatal error on install caused by mismatch in config.json between class name and namespace. |
| 1.0.1 | 2024-06-27 | updated for compatibility with current REDCap UI (LTS 14.0.32, 14.4.1) |