On-Line Hide/Reveal Sample Issues (System reports out of numbers when it appears it should not be)

During a shift, if you hide and reveal specific sample types this can cause the system to think the study has run out of sample, even though there are records to dial on. The study needs to be stopped so you can do either a verify, sort_system_calls, or completely rebuild the fone file in order for the system to see that there are available numbers to dial on.


The issue is when you hide and then reveal the same set of records, those records get out of call order. The system depends on records being in call order in order to dial the sample as efficiently as possible. In the process of hiding and revealing you have caused a record that was just dialed to move to the top of the stack. That record has not waited long enough to be dialed again and so it locks out the entire rest of the stack. The system always assumes that the next record has waited the longest. The problem will only happen when you both hide and reveal a number shortly after it was just dialed.

There are several things that can be done to avoid having to bring the study down to get the sample to come out.

1) The easiest thing to do is reduce the minimum system call time to some very low value (D screen should help with this) to get those numbers to come out. Once you have been dialing for a while you can likely set the value back up as those problematic records have likely already been dealt with. The downside of this is you can call numbers that were just called. However, all of these should be system callbacks (basically no answers or answering machines) so in general there will not be much wasted effort.

2) The best solution is to use markets. Then you can close and open markets from the market screen. This has many advantages, however, it’s understood it is not always practical to have a market built for every possible quota group.

3) This is the trickiest solution, but probably will work the best in most situations. You want to make sure that those recently dialed numbers are NOT at the top of any of the dialing stacks. The downside of this approach is you have to remember some tricky syntax in order to get it to work and know about what time and day it is.

There are two similar, but slightly different ways to do this.

You can either NOT reveal any of the recently dialed sample or when you have finished all the reveals, rehide any recently dialed numbers.

The first thing to be aware of is that the date/time of the last attempt of a number is stored in 6010.12 in the format yyyymmddhhmm In general, you will never have a situation where the last call to a number was made a year ago, so you can actually forget about the year and just look in 6014.8 for mmddhhmm.

Let’s suppose your current minimum system time is set to 180 (3 hours). And it is now 5:30pm EDT. What you want to do is get rid of any number that was dialed after 2:30.

You could use the following select statement to hide all those numbers:where 08 is the month, 05 is today’s day of the month, 1430 is 2:30pm in military time.

You likely also want to have this only apply to the system numbers and you can do this by adding the following to the select statement: [5020.5]>=350 and [6014.8] > 08051430

Another downside here is if you do not quickly do this hide, you can temporarily be out of numbers. This approach though can always be used even if you are using the reveal approach below and just forget to do it. You can also keep those records from ever coming out by excluding them when you reveal the sample. This has the advantage of them never getting in the way in the first place.You would want to have the comparison be in the opposite direction.


Suppose your reveal statement was [61.4#”blue”,”red “]


you would want it to be [61.4#”blue”,”red “] and [6014.8] < 08051430


The disadvantage of this approach is if you are revealing using a bunch of different selects, you would need to include the extra criteria on every one of them. The tell tale signature of this problem is if you compare the D screen to the A or F screens and the A/F screens show a very large number of phone records, but the D screen shows +<number>. If you have been hiding and revealing sample and see this on the screens, you for sure want to issue the hide command to get rid of the recently dialed numbers.