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. The button is there if you can write queries. 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 the trial adds tasks for queries (a trial administrator switches this on under Tasks > Settings), a matching task is put on the task board for them too. It moves to the completed lane when the query is closed, and back if the query is reopened.

Automatic queries

Rather than watching for problems by hand, you can have Trialflare raise queries for you. On the Automatic queries tab, a rule describes the data that should raise a query (an answer out of range, a score over a threshold, a missing field) and who the query goes to. Where your team has the feature, "Smart" automatic queries also ask Trialflare AI to look for anomalous values no rule describes.

Queries raised this way appear in the list like any other, marked as raised by the system. See Automatic queries for how to set them up.

The queries list

Each row shows the query's title, its participant (Questionnaire for a questionnaire submission), the data type it is about (or Whole response), its status, when it was raised and by whom (hover over the avatar for their name), 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, except on the participant's ID, which opens a preview of the participant without leaving the list. 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.

Queries on a participant's record

A participant's open queries are listed on their record, so whoever is looking at that participant can see there is work to do on their data without going to the Queries page.

• Information tab: each open query has a purple Open query card under Needs attention, alongside any stages they are behind on or have due soon. The card gives the query's title, the form and question it is about (or Whole response), and how long it has been open; the oldest come first. Clicking a card opens the query — the same panel as on the Queries page — so you can comment on it, reassign it or resolve it there. Resolving a query takes its card away straight away; the panel stays open until you close it. If the queries can't be loaded, a grey card says so, and clicking it tries again. A withdrawn participant's queries are still shown, though their schedule no longer is.
• Responses tab: each field's row in the response viewer shows how many queries have been raised on it, and a button above a response shows the queries on the response as a whole. Click a query in either list to open it on the Queries page.

You see the queries you would see on the Queries page: all of them if you can read the study's queries, or otherwise only those assigned to you.

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, from the ⋮ menu beside a comment's date. 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, and see the queries on a participant's record and their responses	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.