Starting a New Intervention

Before you begin working on your new intervention you first need to create it.

• Click on the New Intervention button
• Choose a name for your intervention and type it in the Project name field. Each new name must start with a letter and cannot include spaces or any special characters (e.g. ( ) . ? /) , except for underscores (_) and hyphens (-)
• Click Finish to begin working on your intervention. A newly created project should appear in the Project Explorer.

Your intervention will already contain an ‘intervention.lgil’ file. This is the file where you will write the logic for the intervention (although note that the logic for writing error messages to end-users is done elsewhere).

You cannot begin writing any logic in this file until you have created some pages. These pages will contain all of the content of your intervention.

Creating pages

To create a new page, first click on the New Page button (or alternatively select the same option from the File menu).

A new box will pop up and ask you to name the new page. You are asked to choose the LifeGuide Project that you wish to save the new page in so if the new page is for a new project, you will need to create the new project first (see above).

Naming objects in LifeGuide

A unique name is required for every page, interaction, interaction variable and for some text boxes (more information on interactions and text box types can be found later).

• Each unique name must start with a letter, should not include spaces and should not include any special characters (e.g. - ( ) . ? /), however underscores are allowed.

• Use meaningful labels. When giving each page its unique name you will find it useful to make sure you choose labels that are significant to yourself and anyone else working on the intervention with you. For instance, instead of calling each name page1, page2 etc try using ‘welcome’, ‘register’ and ‘warning’ to help you remember what each page is about.

• The page title box on the page properties menu allows you to choose the name that you want to display to end-users when the page is viewed online. So, although you may give a page the unique name ‘controlgroup’ so it is meaningful to you in writing your logic, it might be preferable for end-users to see the name ‘welcome’ so they are unaware that they are in a control group. By changing the page title, the URL of the page will be: http://live.lifeguideonline/player/play/welcome rather than http://live.lifeguideonline/player/play/controlgroup. (Please note these are only examples of how the URL will look - these are not real web links).

• Try to use a consistent system for naming. As your intervention gets bigger and bigger it will become difficult to keep track of what’s on each page so clear, consistent names will help. Pages are listed in the Project Explorer in numerical and alphabetical order. If there are several sessions in your intervention, you may find it helpful to start the name of each page in the session with the name of the session (e.g. session1_intro, session2_intro, etc.), so that all the pages in each session are grouped together in the Project Explorer which will make them easier to find when you have created lots of pages.

• Only use lower case letters for the unique names. This is because when it comes to writing your logic it is essential for the same case to be used in both the page and in the logic otherwise the pages will not display correctly when viewed as a webpage. Consistently using one case when you have to choose a unique name in the authoring tool will help to reduce any problems with this later on.

Other basic functions: Opening, saving and deleting pages

Open a page by double clicking on the page name that is displayed under the project explorer menu.

We recommend that you don’t keep too many pages open at once as this will cause LifeGuide to run slowly.

When you open a new page, it will appear as a page tab. If you have several pages open, the number of pages you have open will be displayed on the right of the page tabs. To view these pages, click on the number and a list will be displayed. The page names in bold are the pages which aren’t displayed in the page tabs. Simply click on one of the names to view that page.

Save a page by clicking on the Save button.

• If you have been working on a number of pages, the Save all option on the file menu will save all the pages you have open in one go.
• Regularly save and close pages that you have finished working on as it can take a long time to save if you have too many pages open at a time
• An asterisk (*) on a page tab indicates that changes have been made that may need saving.

NB: It is also important to take regular back-up copies of the intervention files in case any technical difficulties occur in the version you are working on.

To back up your intervention:

Go to the LifeGuide authoring tool folder and select the workspace folder. In the Workspace folder, copy the project you want to back up and paste it wherever you want to keep the backup copy (e.g. a memory stick). If you later want to use this backup in LifeGuide you will need to import the project back into LifeGuide

Close a page by clicking on the white cross on the page tabs

Delete a page by clicking on the page name in the Project Explorer menu and press the delete key on your keyboard.

NB: when you delete the pages from the project explorer they will still be in the workspace. You will need to delete all 5 files related to the page by going to the workspace folder of the authoring tool.

Importing a project

You might want to import a project if:

• You have downloaded a demo intervention from the LifeGuide community, e.g. to look at the logic of an existing intervention.
• You have a version of your intervention from other members of your research team that you want to view or work on. The recommended way for sharing interventions is through uploading interventions to the LifeGuide Community. This is because it can be difficult to transfer large files via e-mail or impractical to have to share them using a USB stick.
• You have created an intervention in a previous version of the authoring tool and now want to use it in a newer version.
• If you are working with programmers and they have a made a few changes to you intervention, so you now need to import the most up-to-date version (again, the LifeGuide Community website can be used for sharing these files).

Importing the project:

• In the Authoring tool click on file and select Import Project.
• Use the Browse button to select your project from where it is located (e.g. a USB stick or your workspace)
• If the project is not already saved into the workspace of the authoring tool, select the box copy projects into workspace and then click Finish.
• The intervention will then appear in the Project explorer ready to be viewed, changed and edited.

Renaming a project

To rename a project, right-click on the project and select the rename option, or select the project and press F2. Then type in the new name. Project names cannot include spaces or any special characters (e.g. ( ) . ? /) , except for underscores (_)and hyphens (-).

Closing and opening projects

If you have more than one project in the Project Explorer, you may find that LifeGuide runs slower than usual. Closing a project that you are not currently using can speed up authoring tool and the time it takes to save pages and build the workspace. If you have several versions of your intervention in the authoring tool, you may find it useful to close the ones you are not working on so that you do not accidentally work on an older version! Closing a project does not delete it – it simply closes it down until you want to open it and use it again. When a project is closed, it will still appear in the Project Explorer, but you cannot access the pages unless you open it. To close a project, right-click on the project folder and select Close Project. When you close a project, the open folder icon next to the project will change to a blue closed folder icon. To open a project that you had previously closed, simply right-click on the project in the Project Explorer and select Open Project.

Deleting a project

To delete a project, right-click on the project in Project Explorer and select delete. You will be given two options:

• Also delete contents under ‘C:\Program Files\LifeGuide’. This will permanently delete the intervention and will remove it from the workspace folder. The project cannot be retrieved afterwards if you select this option.
• Do not delete contents – this will delete the intervention from the Project Explorer, but the intervention will remain in the workspace folder so you will have the option of importing it back into LifeGuide.