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.
Figure 2 here
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
- 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.