Concept Topic

Popup Interview

A popup interview is a single or series of dialogs you present using a script link dialog element and a computation containing one or more ASK instructions. Popup interviews are most useful when you want to gather information outside of your main interview flow. For example, you might use a popup interview to gather the names of all the parties to a transaction.

Overview

Popup interviews enable you to query your template users for data that you don't necessarily want to ask in the main flow of your template. You may want to use the answers you gather with a popup interview to pre-populate other dialogs or variables in your interview with answers, or to provide data to a computation.

Common Tasks

The  following tasks are commonly associated with popup interviews:

• Creating a popup interview
• Testing a template

Workflow

The workflow for creating a popup dialog is not entirely obvious. To access the ability to launch a popup interview from within a given template's main interview, you first need the following components:

• A "parent" dialog that is part of the main interview (to host the button or link that invokes the popup interview)
• A script link dialog element (that you place on the parent dialog)
• A computation (this uses one or more ASK instructions to display the variables or dialogs you want present in the popup interview)

With all these elements in place, in the script link dialog element editor, you can choose between using a link or a button to invoke your popup. When HotDocs generates your template's main interview, your parent dialog displays the link or button that enables your template users to invoke the popup interview