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Protect elements from deletion

For projects with a direct survey engine connection

Updated at 2023-05-22 18:34:27 UTC

Protect elements to avoid potentially deleting or changing them. This is applicable for projects where you can reset elements by pulling the data layout directly from the survey engine.

Protobi horizontal bar chart titled 'Bar by S1' displaying the question 'What are your initial thoughts about the device you have just reviewed?' Responses are grouped by General Practitioner (orange bars) and Practice Nurse (green bars) across eight categories: #EASY TO USE (38.3%/47.5%), #GOOD (28.3%/5.0%), #DOSE INDICATOR (10.0%/7.5%), #ECO-FRIENDLY (10.0%/20.0%), #NOT EASY (6.7%/27.5%), #SIMILAR (6.7%/10.0%), #OTHER (5.0%), and #COST EFFECTIVE (3.3%/7.5%). A black shield icon appears in the top-right corner, indicating the element is protected from deletion.

Turn on protect

Turn on the protect feature in the edit properties dialog by selecting “yes”.

Protobi 'More properties' configuration panel showing element settings for a discrete question pie chart (sd1_pie). The panel displays multiple property fields including key, displayKey, headline, title, footnote, type, field, element, children, string, col, split, scale, denominator, weight, maxValue, sortby, showMissing, showPercent, editorOnly, and protect. The 'protect' field dropdown is expanded showing three options: 'Yes' (selected with blue highlight and checkmark), 'No', and '(default)'. At the bottom are 'Cancel' and 'Ok' buttons.

Protect is a heritable attribute, so if you set it at a group level every child element of the group will be protected. Elements that are protected have a shield icon

A small black shield icon on white background, representing Protobi's element protection indicator. This icon appears on elements that have the 'protect' property enabled, visually signaling that the element cannot be deleted.

on the header. 

Protobi Report interface displaying three side-by-side elements with protection enabled. Left: Pie chart titled 'Sample overview' showing 'What is your speciality' with 40% orange (General Practitioner) and 60% green (Practice Nurse) segments. Center: Bar chart labeled 'Bar by S1' showing device review responses grouped by specialty, with categories like #EASY TO USE, #GOOD, #DOSE INDICATOR, etc. Right: Text element titled 'Text automatically generated from data' with blue heading about Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum. All three elements display black shield icons in their top-right corners. The interface includes a top toolbar with buttons (Global, N=100, Clear, Set base, #/%, Format, [NA], Crosstab, Language, Scenario, Export, Save) and a left sidebar showing sections like Chart gallery, Screener, Report, Question Types, Banners, and numbered sections.

Practical use

Protect elements when you want to reset your project's elements without blowing away any manual edits you saved to the project.

Projects that have a survey engine connection can pull the data layout directly from the survey engine's API. For instance you can establish a connection to Confirmit's API and import the layout by pressing “reset elements” under advanced project settings.

This allows you to quickly set up an initial view of your project based on your survey layout. Protobi can even set business rules for your organization such that the setup for certain question types are standardized (i.e. always compact to mean, and show as a bar chart). After you use the “reset elements” option to create an initial view, you can make custom edits manually to specific questions (i.e. change chart type, colors, etc.) or clone elements to create different views. 

But if you reset the elements after you already made some manual edits, they will revert back to the standard setup and any clones in the project will be deleted unless you apply the protect attribute. 

Protobi Project Settings interface for 'Example Pharma Survey' project showing the Advanced tab selected. Top section displays Survey Engine Connection settings with Confirmit REST API connection, Survey ID 'p483092216650', Table name 'main', checkboxes for 'Columns to lower case' (unchecked) and 'Completes only' (checked), and three buttons: Save (blue), Refresh data (green), and Reset elements (orange). Below is a 'Delete project' section with a red Delete button and warning text 'Danger! Deleting a dataset will delete your project and all its data. When it's gone it's gone.' At the bottom is a 'Test' section with three colored buttons: 'Crash server' (orange), 'Server error' (orange), and 'Unrecoverable' (red).