Feature Update – Program Library, *html, GuidedTrack syntax highlithers and using Mailchimp from your program

Here’s what’s new:

Program Library

The Program Library is a collection of programs we have created so that you can use them from your own using the keyword  *program.

These are a few examples of the programs that are available:

  • Widely used measures covering personality, mental disorders, substance use and more:
    • Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), IPIP-NEO-120, IPIP-HEXACO
    • PHQ Screeners, CAGE-AID Questionnaire, DASS-21, PTSD Checklist – PLC-5, Eating Disorder Diagnostic Scale, Levenson Self-Reported Psychopathy Scale
    • Van Westendorp Price Study, Bongard Problems, memory tests
  • Screening and demographic questions: list of countries, US States, education level, income, religiousness, political affiliation, employment
  • Mathematical operations: truncate, round, random number generator, factorial, binary conversion, temperature conversion
  • Text functions: lowercase and trim text, text comparison, URL encoding, email validation
  • Date handling: current date, day of the week calculation, current time conversion to Eastern Time
  • Display programs: display a collection as a table, display a list of items for the user to rank, cute animal pictures

Let’s say you are preparing a study to find out if it is possible to know something about a person’s personality by asking them if they like cheese or not. You will need to ask the participants if they like cheese and measure certain personality traits -for example, the Big Five. Here the Program Library comes in handy: instead of you coding a personality scale, why not use one of the measures we have already created?

Use the search bar to find the scale you need by entering its name if you know it, or browsing by keywords. Search results that are programs from the library are labeled as such. Click on one of them and you will see a modal like this:

The modal displays the code needed to use this program from your own – which you can automatically insert by clicking on the Insert button on the lower right corner. Additionally you can see the Code of the program and run it in Preview mode to see what it does. You can also create your own copy of any program in the Library to make changes and customize it to your needs.

Notice that there are some programs that require you to assign value to some variables in order to run: if you want to make a text lowercase, you need to let the program know what the text is. The generated code will guide you in populating these variables, just substitute the sample value we give you for the actual one:

As you can see, preparing a study to test your cheese/personality hypothesis is now easier than ever!

Insert *html code in your program

You can add cool formatting to the things you display on your program using this new feature. The syntax is simple: just indent the html code under the keyword *html.

For example, you can display headers with different sizes:

When you run the code, this is what you see…

You can also use program variables in your html code! Check out this code:

In fact, if you want to display a collection of collections as an html table, you don’t even need to write the code -we’ve done it for you. It is this program of the Program Library. Use it as is, or copy it to tweak the design of the table it displays.

These are just two possible uses of this keyword, but you will find more as you write your programs. Just remember that the html code has to be W3C compliant, otherwise there will be an error message when running your program.

Access your Mailchimp account from a GuidedTrack program

If you use Mailchimp to manage your mailing lists, you can access it from your GuidedTrack program using *service. This means that when someone running your program gives you their email address, you can automatically add it to your Mailchimp audience. Additionally, you can access subscribers’ information and update it based on the program they use or the data they enter into it.

Learn here all about accessing your Mailchimp account from your programs.

GuidedTrack syntax highlighters

If you use a code editor or an IDE (such as Sublime or Atom) to write your GuidedTrack programs, you can download a handy syntax highlighter so that your code appears in color similar to that on GuidedTrack.com!