A Simple Comment Collector System

Developed by Tom Hall and Peter Hoyt

Do you have a need for an efficient way of tracking changes needed to your ToolBook files during your Quality Assurance process?  Quite often it is likely that you just produce the HTML product, have folks go through it, write down what they find as problems, and then it's up to you then to locate those problems and make the fixes. 

We feel we have a good alternative for you with a simple Comment Collector System we have created.  The system relies upon a couple of JavaScript functions, asp pages, and an SQL database.

We can work with you to set up a Launch Page and Menu to test and review your lessons.  Here is a very simple Launch Page:

To get started on the ToolBook side of things, you simply add a button to each page such as that shown here (this graphic can be customized to suit your needs).

After linking to the provided JavaScript file and setting up several global variables, this is what you see after publishing the file to HTML and clicking the button Comment Collector:

As this form opens for the first time in any lesson, the Reviewer is prompted to enter their name. At this point, they enter the comment and click the Submit button.  In this instance, the Reviewer is making a suggestion as to a change in the text for a question in a quiz.

On the developer side of things, you would have a link to a Comment Menu such as that shown here:

Note: Comments for each project are separated in the Database by a Project ID (PJID=3 in this case.)  This is something that is set in the ToolBook book, preferably in a Blank Starter book that you would use to start each book for a particular project.

As a Developer is ready to make changes once a review is completed, he/she would simply click the link to view the comments as shown below:

You can see from this that a Reviewer named Tom has reviewed the Lesson RDS_100_100 on 4/18 and has made three comments.  Note all the information that is collected for each comment.  The Mode information might relate to a situation where you have a Simulation Lesson that has been set up to run in multiple modes such as Practice or Demonstration.

Clicking Edit brings up this form:

In this instance, an Author comment is entered and the Comment marked as Ignored since there will be no change to the lesson based upon this comment.

This is another comment:

In this instance, the author realizes that a mistake has been made, opens the ToolBook file, goes to Page 100_100_015, makes the change, and then marks this comment as Fixed. The nice part of process is that if the Reviewer has typed a lengthy string of text to be replaced, the Author simply uses Copy and Paste to avoid keyboarding errors.

This process of looking at the comments and setting their status continues until all comments have been cleared for a lesson.  Note that the Author would then move on to any comments for the next lesson in the list on the Comment Menu.

The lesson is then republished and moved on up the QA process (for instance from QA1 to QA2 to Approved).

The data will always be in the Database for future reference and anyone with any skill at Data Mining could generate a report to allow you to look at old comments, cleared comments, etc.

Summary of What We Provide

1. A Catalog with the Comment Collector button to be added to each page of your book.

2. Instructions on how to set up several Global Variables in your book to make the Comment Collector System work.

3. The JavaScript file needed along with instructions on how to set this part of the process up in each book.

4. Instructions on how to set up the SQL Database.

5. Sample files and a sample launch page to allow you to test the process on your Web Server.