Posts Tagged ‘interview’

ASK DIALOG and ASK VAR

The ASK instruction does exactly what it appears it will do – forces HotDocs to ASK (present to user) a specific variable or dialog.  ASK is quite often under utilized, as many developers permit HotDocs to generate a template interview.  For those developers in the know, there is a lot more functionality, flexibility and control possible when you write your own interview.  For those developers who design their own interviews, use of the ASK statement is absolutely critical.

In its simplest form, you simply ASK a variable or dialog.  Lets say we are designing a conveyancing/real estate master interview.  We have borrowers, lenders, their counsel and perhaps a guarantor or two.  The borrowers may not necessarily always have representation, nor will the borrowers always have a guarantor.  So here’s how our interview might look:
In its simplest form, you simply ASK a variable or dialog.  Lets say we are designing a conveyancing/real estate master interview.  We have borrowers, lenders, their counsel and perhaps a guarantor or two.  The borrowers may not necessarily always have representation, nor will the borrowers always have a guarantor.  So here’s how our interview might look:

ASK INTRO DLG //ask whatever intro/matter information we need
ASK PROPERTY DLG //get property information
ASK LOAN DLG //get loan related information

ASK BORROWER DLG //basic information - how many borrowers, any shared address for service - details common to all borrowers

IF ANSWERED ( BORR Num LMT ) //force user to specify how many borrowers there are going to be
ASK BORROWERS RPT //info for each borrower
END IF
IF BORR Counsel TF //did the user specify that the borrowers had counsel?
ASK BORROWER COUNSEL DLG
END IF
IF LOAN Guaranteed TF //did the user specify that the loan was guaranteed?
ASK GUARANTOR DLG //if so, grab guarantor details as well
END IF

With developer designed interviews and the ASK instruction used in conjunction with IF statements, we can minutely control the interview and user experience.  ONLY those dialogs necessary are presented to the user, which reduces the chance of erroneous data entry, while forcing the user to be presented with the dialogs and questions that are necessary to complete the specifics of each transaction.  Dynamically. Efficiently. Correctly.

Interview Computations (Best Practices)

A few recent posters to the HotDocs list have suggested it was not “best practices” to use computation in the INTERVIEW computation; that is was best to use a series of ASK statements, surrounded by IF EXPRESSIONS to guide the interview. This Blog add looks into Best Practices for creating a document-scope INTERVIEW computation in HotDocs

Related Link: General information on HotDocs

A few recent posters have suggested it was not “best practices” to use computation in the INTERVIEW computation; that is was best to use a series of ASK statements, surrounded by IF EXPRESSIONS to guide the interview.

Best practices are always best understood in context:  what is the purpose of the practice; when is this practice appropriate.  In the case of using computations inside the INTERVIEW computation, there are a number of competing factors that affect your choice.

READABILITY: The purpose of the interview computation is to define the scope of the INTERVIEW for a document.  To this end, it is meant for a sequence of ASK statements.  The more you can focus on what is being asked, and place it on the dialog, the easier it will be to debug scripting issues arising from “misplaced dialogs” and “orphan variables”.  There may also be a benefit for those using HotDocs Online, where it is indeed best practices to explicitly state the order of dialogs asked.

SPEED OF PROCESSING: There are times where HotDocs processes or calculates certain scripts FASTER than other ways, used by more experienced developers.  I have found a modular master interview, with optional calls out to computation variables that contain the dialog asking sequence to actually run faster.  In a Master Will, I might have a sequence dealing with pre-residuary gifts that I would isolate from the main interview in its own computation.

DATA-MANIPULATION: HotDocs 6 and HotDocs 2005 fundamentally changed the way HotDocs processes data.  It changed from a “linear processing” to “recursive processing” whereby each new data entry leads to a recalculation of the complete interview tree. Being aware of this has led to certain best practices on our part, namely using either (1) Buttons that launch computations or (2) computation scripts in the main interview that contain “flags” to determine whether or not they have been launched.

MASTER CMP vs. DISTRIBUTED CMP: also known as MATTER SCOPE INTERVIEW vs. DOCUMENT SCOPE INTERVIEW:  I am a big believe of Matter Scope Interviews; a single CMP file that launches a master interview that start out with a Document Selection dialog, and then renders a custom interview based on the document(s) selected.  In such an environment, interview scriptlets (or subinterview computations) are critical.  On the otherhand, if you are only doing document scope interviews, which work in a system with shared matter-scope answer file, it would be easier to keep the scripting to simple ask statements in the INTERVIEW file.

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