Locked questionnaires or workflows

When you open a questionnaire or workflow with the "Edit" button, the following happens:

  • The document is "checked out" of the database and reserved for you. In the list of documents, you will see a "Diskette" symbol in the "Draft" column. Other people will see a "padlock" in the "Locked" column. If they hover over the "padlock" it will display who has opened the document and reserved it (checked it out). 

  • It will remain in "checked out" status even if you close the editor or close the application.
  • From this moment on, you are working on a draft version of your document. The system autosaves your work as well to keep the draft up to date. However, no one but yourself has access to the draft.

To remove the lock on the document, you must do one of two things:

  1. Save your document and exit. Click the "New Version" button. This will save all your changes since you opened the document, even if there can be many days passed. This will create a new version of the document and check the document back into the database and remove the lock.
  2. You can click the "Delete draft" button. NB! This will delete any changes that you have done to the document, since the last saved version. So make 100% sure that you are happy with this. If you are unsure, it is much better to save a new version as it might be you checked the document out several days before, and did changes that you did not save and that you might have forgotten about. If you delete the draft, there is no way for you to recover. Unlike saved versions, where you can revert to any previously saved version.

If someone else has a document "checked-out" that you want to work with, you will notice a "Padlock" in the Locked column.

If you hover over the "padlock", you can see who it is.

You have 3 options:

1) Contact the person and ask them to "check-in" (save) the document. Then when you click refresh, you will see that the "padlock" is gone

2) Click on "New version". This will save any changes that the person might have done, and create a new version that you then can open and edit. If the person still has the document open and later tries to save it, he will receive an error message.

3) Click on "Delete Draft". This will delete any changes the person might have done to the document, but typically this often happens because people click on "Edit" instead of "View" when they just want to view something and forget to remove the "checked-out" status. This will revert to the current version (last version saved). Likewise, if the person has the document still open, and then tries to save it, they will receive an error message.

Sometimes you might experience that someone has "checked out" a document that you worked on (e.g. they deleted your draft and opened the document themselves). In this case, you might get "system errors" telling you that the document is not "Checked out" to you. In this instance, you should check the list of the documents (click refresh) find out who has the document locked, and find out how to resolve the issue. If you find yourself in a position where you might lose a substantial amount of work, please contact support before you e.g. close the document, as if not you might lose all your changes.

NB! If you only intend to look at a document, e.g. to copy a question into another questionnaire, you should always use the "View" and not the "Edit" button when opening the document. If you view a document it is not "checked out" and anyone can open it for further editing.