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Review issues

Usage Check

Contract Express Author
 uses 3 levels of scanning to understand your document:

Scanning as you type

This scan runs whenever the
Author
 task pane is open, and as the name suggests it is automatically invoked as you make changes to your template.
This scan will pick up new variables and Business Rules and add them to the dictionary as they are typed. They can then be reused by clicking the corresponding buttons from the Dictionary Editor.

Manual scan

A manual scan is run anytime you open the
Dictionary Editor
 or
Markup Editor
.
As with scanning as you type, manual scanning will look for new variables and business rules. In addition it will also detect syntax errors, mismatched brackets and incorrect use of variables (e.g. type mismatches).
Manual scanning can also report on whether a variable is used in the document. Issues raised will be reported in the issues list on the
Author
 task pane.

Full usage check

A full usage analysis can be run in three places:
(i) by clicking the Usage Check button on the
Contract Express
 ribbon tab
(ii) on a Test or Upload of the Questionnaire,
Contract Express Author
 will automatically invoke a full usage check
(iii) by clicking the usage check icon on the footer of the Author task pane.
A usage check will do everything the manual scan does but also investigate relevancy and repetition contexts. A usage check can highlight spans that are never going to be included in a generated template (i.e. because of incorrect Business Rules applied to them), variables that are irrelevant and questions appearing in the wrong order on the questionnaire. Issues raised are reported in the issues list in the Dictionary Editor.
The Usage Check categorises issues into three levels of severity:
  • Serious (red stop sign)
  • Non-serious (amber triangle)
  • Warnings (blue information icon)
The number of issues for each level can be seen next to the respective icon.
The list presents the issues in order of severity, with the most serious errors at the top. The errors are further categorized by type, in bold text, to provide context as you scan through the list.
Clicking on the errors will navigate you to the position of the error in the template so you can easily troubleshoot.
Clicking into an issue that can be resolved through the Dictionary Editor will open the relevant Dictionary element for you to easily spot and resolve the issue.
Clicking into an issue that can be resolved through the Markup Editor will automatically open the Markup Editor.
The Issues section in the Markup Editor will show any Usage Check errors related to the current expression displayed, as well as additional troubleshooting information to help you resolve them.
For more on the types of issues reported in the issues list see Troubleshooting.

This article applies to:

  • Product: Contract Express

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