Version 1.0.4
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 your pre-save scrolling location.
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Stay focused! marks the place where you left off with a thick blue partial border, so that you can track how much data entry or data collection you have performed since your last save.
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Stay focused! suppresses the post-save display of the popup dialog alerting you to required fields that are blank. This dialog 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.
By default, a Stay focused! status message is displayed at the top of the form editor, next to a microscope icon (see below). At the minimum, this message will alert you to Stay focused! being active.
However, this message will also include a count of required fields with missing values, if after clicking Save&Stay REDCap detects missing field values and attempts to open the 'required fields' popup. Stay focused! will thwart any such attempt, but it will indicate in its status message the count of required but missing field values.
If you do not want the Stay focused! status message displayed for a project, check "Suppress the Stay focused! status message" in the EM Configuration.
Please let us know of any suspected browser incompatibilities. We have tested Stay focused! on Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari; on Windows and IOS.
We are grateful to Bindu Rajesh of the St. John’s Research Institute for helping us test and refine Stay focused!.
| version | date | description |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.4 | 2024-07-14 | Refactoring for code clarity, or at least less murk |
| 1.0.3 | 2024-07-11 | Updated to re-install event listeners following a window resize. |
| 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 (tested on LTS 14.0.32, 14.4.1) |
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.