Introduction

HyperRESEARCH 2.6 introduced an Open Special window that appears when the program first opens. The window provides helpful guidance by presenting the three most logical choices when starting the program: creating a new Study, opening a recently-saved Study, or opening another Study file from your hard drive:

But the Open Special window is even more special than that: it can be customized to include a list of any Study files you want. This can be useful for teachers by allowing them to create Study files that correspond to a lesson plan and have them clearly available to their students when they launch HyperRESEARCH. It gets this information from a simple text file you or your system admin create and put in HyperRESEARCH's plugins folder.

While we don't expect this to be HyperRESEARCH's most popular feature, it can be very helpful in university labs where you can pre-install HyperRESEARCH, or when producing custom CD-ROMs for students with lesson materials. Remember that the free version of HyperRESEARCH allows up to 50 codes and 7 cases, making it suitable for free use in teaching the basics of qualitative methods.

This document describes the three steps needed to customize the Open Special window: writing the Special file containing the Study file names, putting it in the Plugins folder, and launching HyperRESEARCH.

1. Write the hrSpecial.xml file

Whenever the Open Spcial window is opened, it checks inside HyperRESEARCH's plugins folder for a file named hrSpecial.xml. If not found the window appears as shown above.

To add your own list of Study files to the Open Special window you just create a text file containing a list of the files you want to appear there, and save it to the plugins folder with the name hrSpecial.xml.

The file uses a simple XML format. While a thorough explanation of XML is beyond the scope of this document, its limited use here can be summarized simply: XML files contain bits of information separated by tags that describe the type of information it is. A tag surrounds each element, with a beginning tag between "<" and ">" characters, and an ending tag between "</" and ">". For example your phone number might be stored in an XML file like:

   <person><name>Richard Gaskin</name><phone>555-1212</phone></person>

The tags required in an hrSpecial.xml file are:

HyperResearchOpenSpecial - Identifies the data as being for the Open Special window

menu - Contains the data for the menu list

label - The label that appears to the left of the menu

studyfile - The path to a Study file. Up to 20 can be included.

To illustrate how these elements come together suppose we have a researcher, the esteemed Dr. Brown, who wants to share a set of four Study files he's created with his students for use during lab time. He gives the study files to the lab's admin who creates a text file contaning this:

   <HyperResearchOpenSpecial>
      <menu>
         <label>Dr. Brown:</label>
         <studyfile>./Lessons/Lesson 1.hs2</studyfile>
         <studyfile>./Lessons/Lesson 2.hs2</studyfile>
         <studyfile>./Lessons/Lesson 3.hs2</studyfile>
         <studyfile>./Lessons/Lesson 4.hs2</studyfile>
      </menu>
   </HyperResearchOpenSpecial>

Note that the file paths shown in this example are relative to the application folder. In this example the Open Special window can expect to find a file named Lesson 1.hs2 in a folder named Lessons inside the HyperRESEARCH application folder, as shown in the file listing below. The Study files can be placed in any folder on the same drive so long as their paths are written correctly in the hrSpecial.xml file.

2. Putting it in the Plugins folder

After writing the XML shown above, the admin saves the file into the plugins folder with the HyperRESEARH application folder with the name hrSpecial.xml:

3. Launch HyperRESEARCH

That's it. If the hrSpecial.xml file has been written correctly and is in the plugins folder, the next time HyperRESEARCH is launched it will find the file and display the list of Study files as specified:

Future Customization Options

This modest enhancement was added in response to a customer request. While it may not be useful to everyone, it illustrates ResearchWare's willingness to explore options for making HyperRESEARCH flexibly adapt to your needs. If you have suggestions for other ways we can enhance HyperRESEARCH for your workflow and environment please feel free to drop me a note with your request and we'll see if we can include it in a future version.