Organizing Script Pages into Sections

The easiest way to understand how to organize script pages into sections is through an example. Suppose you were given the following list of required information that an IEG script needs to capture:

• Name and Contact Details
• Race and Ethnicity
• Household Members
• Household Relationships
• Income from Wages and Salaries
• Income from Tips and Commissions
• Utility Payments
• Travel Expenses
• Medical Expenses

To give the user a sense of what information will be requested of him or her, you could organize your pages into sections as follows:

• About You
  • Name and Contact Details
  • Race and Ethnicity
• Household
  • Household Members
  • Household Relationships
• Income
  • Income from Wages and Salaries
  • Income from Tips and Commissions
• Expenses
  • Utility Payments
  • Travel Expenses
  • Medical Expenses

The bigger the script (i.e., the more pages you have in it), the more important it is to group them into logical sections. The following is an example of how the XML should be structured for this IEG script:

<ieg-script>
        <section>
                <title id="AboutYouSection.Title">
                        <![CDATA[About You]]>
                </title>
                <question-page id="AboutYouPage">
                        <cluster>
                                <question id="firstName">
                                …
                                </question>
                        …
                        </cluster>
                </question-page>
                <summary-page id="AboutYouSummary">
                …
                </summary-page>
        </section>
        <section>
                <title id="Household.Title">
                        <![CDATA[Household]]>
                </title>
        …
        </section>
        …
</ieg-script>

Each page within a script can contain a number of questions, which in turn are visibly grouped together into ‘clusters' with the aim of making the screens more intuitive for a user. Each question consists of the text used to ask the question and an input control used to capture the answer. The type of input control used is determined by the data-type defined to store the answer, which will be discussed in further detail later. Each cluster on a page has various properties associated with it which allow you to control the layout and position of the questions within it.