One of the benefits of adopting TrialGrid for Rave study build is the ability to use spreadsheet-like editing for Form Fields and Edit Checks. For just over a year now this facility has also been available for Folders.

Editing a set of folders in a spreadsheet view is very convenient and time-saving. This view allows copying and pasting direct from Microsoft Excel, re-ordering of ordinals via drag and drop, filtering of columns and undo/redo of changes:

Adding a Property Sheet view for folders is easy. First add a new Folder Property sheet from the Property sheets section of your URL in TrialGrid:

Name the sheet and set it Active. If you want to define more than one property sheet for Folders you can set an Ordinal for the sheet which will define where it appears in the list of available sheets.

Next assign the users who are able to see and use this sheet. You can assign it to all users, project owners or users with specific roles in a Project.

Finally, select which attributes of Folders you want to include in the property sheet, the headings that will appear in the spreadsheet view and any help text you want to show users. In this view you can also include any custom properties you have defined for Folders in TrialGrid - custom properties can be used for documentation or storing standards identifiers for example.

Save the sheet and that's it, your property sheet is ready to use and will appear for the users it is assigned to in the Folder listing of every Draft in your URL:

Summary

Property sheets provide a very convenient method of editing Folders, especially the subject calendar values. Setting up Property sheet for Folders is easy and the sheet can be customized to only include key fields.

Deleting Folders

One of the features of Rave Architect which can be frustrating for study builders is its enforcement of referential integrity. Simply stated, Architect wants to make sure that your study is always valid and that if, say, a Folder called "SCREENING" is referenced in an Edit Check, that a Folder called "SCREENING" does actually exist. This means it won't allow you to delete that Folder until that reference is removed.

Normally this is what you want but it can also feel constraining when you really want to delete that Folder but can't...

...and as you can see, Architect doesn't tell you HOW the Folder is in use.

To be fair to Architect, it's trying to stop you doing something you will regret. If the Folder is referenced in 20 Edit Checks, removing that Folder will make those Edit Checks invalid and Architect won't let you save an invalid check so should it delete the related Edit Checks?

At times like these many Rave study builders will simply download the Architect Loader Spreadsheet to Excel - an environment that doesn't enforce referential integrity - and start doing search and replace and deletions. The danger of that is that you can waste a lot of time trying to re-load the study back into Architect when you don't get all the references matched up right again and you get caught in the edit -> try to load -> edit -> try to load cycle.

It would be nice if Architect warned you of the consequences of deleting the Folder and then allowed you to go ahead anyway. Kind of like TrialGrid does....

In this case TrialGrid is telling you what the consequences of deleting this Folder will be. You can then decide if that is really what you want to do.

Deleting checks and Derivations from the Form Editor

Following on from Folders it can be frustrating to find that you can't delete a Field from a Form because it has some related Edit Check. You could always see the Edit Checks related to a Field in the TrialGrid Form editor (just as you can in Rave Architect) but now the TrialGrid version allows you to delete those Edit Checks too:

Draft Compare Report

Comparisons between Drafts are really easy in TrialGrid and we continue to make improvements in this area. In October 2020 we added popup compares but our users wanted a report they could export and share.

So now you can perform a compare and then export it to Excel:

Every object difference is listed along with original and new values and a colored difference report of the changes between them:

This compare report makes it easier than ever to work out what changed between two Drafts and to share a report of those differences.

These are just a few of the convenience features in TrialGrid that help to make Study Builders more productive. Contact us if you'd like a demonstration of this or the many other features of TrialGrid!