REDCap 9.0

NEW FEATURE

Alerts & Notifications

• The Alerts & Notifications feature allows you to construct alerts and send customized email notifications. These notifications may be sent to one or more recipients and can be triggered or scheduled when a form/survey is saved and/or based on conditional logic whenever data is saved or imported. When adding/editing an alert, you will need to 1) set how the alert gets triggered, 2) define when the notification should be sent (including how many times), and 3) specify the recipient, sender, message text, and other settings for the notification. For the message, you may utilize customized options such as rich text, the piping of field variables (including Smart Variables), and uploading multiple file attachments. While similar in many respects to Automated Survey Invitations, Alerts & Notifications allow for greater complexity and have more capabilities. For example, alerts apply to both data entry forms and surveys, and they also allow for more options regarding who can be the recipient of a notification (project users, survey participants, etc.).

• Converting existing Email Alerts into Alerts & Notifications – If your REDCap installation currently has the Email Alerts external module installed and is being used in projects, there will be an option (a green button) at the top left of the Email Alerts configuration page to convert all the Email Alerts in a given project into Alerts & Notifications. This is an opt-in setting, and must be done for each project one at a time. It will present a dialog popup with information so that the user understands that there are some differences between EA and A&N, but overall, everything will be able to be converted, although the alerts might look slightly different afterward as A&N’s. Once the Email Alerts are converted, the Email Alerts module will be automatically disabled for the project, and the user will be redirected to the A&N page. Note: The conversion instructions notes that if (for whatever reason) the A&N’s are not behaving like the user anticipated, they can easily revert back to using Email Alerts again by 1) deactivating all the A&N’s that were created from the conversion, and 2) have an administrator re-enable the Email Alerts module.

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• Improvement: The rich text editors on the Survey Settings page have now been updated to a newer version. (Note: IE9 and IE10 will still use the older version of the rich text editor because they are not compatible with the newer one.)

• Improvement: New records can now be created directly from the Record Status Dashboard. If record auto-numbering is enabled, it will display an “Add new record” button, otherwise it will display a text field for users to enter a new record name to create.

• Improvement: Links to the Online Designer, Data Dictionary Upload page, and Codebook were added to the left-hand project menu for easier navigation. Also, a new section “Project Home and Design” was added on the left-hand menu to contain all these links, as well as the Project Home and Project Setup page links.