Queries
A query is a question about a piece of data someone has submitted — a weight that looks like a typo, a missing answer, a date that can't be right. It is raised against the response it is about, assigned to whoever should answer it, discussed in a comment thread, and closed when it's resolved.
Find them under Queries, which has two tabs: Current queries and Automatic queries. A red count sits beside Queries in the sidebar whenever the study has open ones, so you can see there is work waiting from anywhere in the study. It is there for anyone who can view the queries list, and disappears when nothing is open.
Queries are staff-only. Participants never see them, and nothing about a query appears in the app.
Raising a query
Queries are raised from the data itself, not from the Queries page.
Open a participant's Responses (or a submission on the Questionnaires page) and use the + button in the query column of the response viewer, on the row of the field you're asking about. You'll be asked for:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Query title | A short summary. This is what appears in the list and in notifications |
| Query description | The detail — what looks wrong, and what you need back |
| Assign query to | One or more people. Optional, but a query assigned to nobody is a query nobody is told about |
The query records the answer that was given at the time it was raised, so later edits to the response don't change what was being asked about.
Anyone you assign is emailed straight away, with a link that opens the response the query was raised against. If your team has Tasks enabled, a matching to-do is created for them too, and it moves to Done when the query is closed.
Automatic queries
Rather than watching for problems by hand, you can have Trialflare raise queries for you. On the Automatic queries tab, create a rule set with:
- a data type — the field the rules are judged against, and the field the query is raised on. A rule set with no data type is about the submission as a whole and needs a response score rule and a trial stage rule instead;
- one or more rules. All of them must be met for a query to be raised;
- a query template — the title, description and assignees the raised query will carry.
Automatic queries are raised as data comes in, and appear in the list like any other, marked as raised by the system.
Where your team has the feature enabled, "Smart" automatic queries additionally ask Trialflare AI to look for anomalous results that no rule describes, using instructions you write and assigning to people you choose. It can make mistakes, so treat it as a prompt to look rather than a finding.
The queries list
Each row shows the query's title, the data type it is about (or Whole response), its status, when it was raised, who raised it, and who it is assigned to. A speech-bubble badge next to the title shows how many comments the query has.
Filter by status — Open queries or Resolved queries — and by assignee. Clicking a row anywhere opens the query. The green tick on a row closes a query without opening it, asking you to confirm first — it is available to anyone who can write queries, and to the people the query is assigned to.
Working on a query
Clicking a query's row opens it. On the left are its details: the participant or questionnaire submission it belongs to, the question that was asked, and the answer that was given, with a link through to the participant's record.
Status and assignees save the moment you change them — there is no separate confirm step, and anyone newly assigned is emailed straight away. If a save fails, the control goes back to what it was, so what you see is always what was stored.
On the right are two tabs.
Comments
The conversation about the query. Each comment shows its author and when it was written, and you can:
- Mention someone with
@— see below; - Attach files — PDFs, images and Word documents. Attachments are stored with the trial and visible to everyone who can see the query. A comment can be nothing but an attachment;
- Edit your own comments, and delete your own. Trial administrators can delete anyone's.
Resolving or reopening a query adds a line to the thread saying who did it and when — written by Trialflare rather than by a person, so it can't be edited or deleted, and nobody is notified about it. It means the thread tells the whole story of the query, including how it ended.
Anyone who can see a query can read its comments. Anyone who can act on a query can add one — that means people with permission to write queries, and the people the query is assigned to, who can reply even if they have no queries permission at all.
Ctrl+Enter (⌘+Enter on a Mac) posts a comment without reaching for the mouse.
Notes
A single shared block of working notes, saved with the query. It is not a conversation and nobody is notified about it — use it for the scratch working behind a query. Unlike everything else in the panel, notes are not saved as you type: use Save notes underneath the box, which tells you when you have unsaved changes.
Mentioning people
Typing @ in a comment or a participant note offers the people on your study. Choose one and their name is inserted; when you post, they are emailed and sent a push notification, with a link that opens straight onto what you wrote.
Only people who can already see the thing you're writing on can be mentioned on it. If you name someone who can't, the mention is quietly dropped rather than notifying them about something they can't open — so a mention never grants access to anything.
Mentions in a participant note deliberately don't carry the note's text into the email. The notification says who mentioned you and on which participant, and you read the note in Trialflare.
Who gets notified
| Event | Who is told |
|---|---|
| A query is assigned to someone | The people newly assigned |
| A comment is posted | Anyone mentioned in it, plus the query's assignees and whoever raised it |
| A comment is edited | Only people the edit newly mentions |
Nobody is told twice about the same comment — if you are both mentioned in a comment and assigned to the query, you get one notification, about the mention. You are never notified about your own comment.
Permissions
Queries use the trial-level permissions below (see Roles and permissions). There is no separate permission for comments: reading and writing them follows the query itself.
| To | You need |
|---|---|
| See the queries list and open a query | trial.readQueries (or trial-wide read access) |
| Raise a query, change its status or assignees, and comment | trial.writeQueries (or trial-wide write access) |
| Reply to and close a query assigned to you | Nothing — being an assignee is enough |
| Delete a query, or someone else's comment | Trial administrator |
| View automatic query rules | trial.readAutomaticQueries |
| Create and edit automatic query rules | trial.writeAutomaticQueries |
Locked databases
When a trial's database is locked, no new queries or comments can be raised, existing comments can't be edited or deleted, and queries can't be deleted. Queries and their threads can still be read, and a query can still be resolved or reopened — the line that records it is added to the thread even while the database is locked, because it records something you were allowed to do.