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.

Turn on protect

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

 

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 on the header. 

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.