How to Upload and Convert Existing A2J Guided Interviews to A2J Author 6

  1. Locate your existing A2J Guided Interview files that were created in A2J Author 4.0.

  2. If they are currently on LHI’s production site, lawhelpinteractive.org, log into your account and download them.

    1. Once logged into lawhelpinteractive.org, go to “Developer Portal” and select "My Interviews" if you uploaded the A2J 4.0 Guided Interview or "All Interviews" if you aren't the original owner of the file. 

    2. You can narrow your search by filtering by content type (A2J4) or filtering by keyword in the Title. Click on the three dots next to "Title" or "Type" to see the filter options. We recommend filtering with "contains" rather than "Is equal to". 

    3. When you have found the A2J Guided Interview you'd like to update, scroll to the far right and select the download icon to download the interview files. You'll get a zipped file containing your A2J Guided Interview and any attached files (like images or xml lists). 

 

  1. A zipped file will download to your local machine. Do not unzip it. You can upload the entire zipped file directly into A2J Author 6. 

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Log into your A2JAuthor.org and open Author.

  1. For instructions on how to get an a2jauthor.org account, check here.

  2. Author 6 opens with the Interviews Tab open already. Click the “Upload A2J Guided Interview” button.

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  1. Browse to the folder where you downloaded your zipped interview file. 

  2. Select the entire zipped file. You can also upload just the interview file if you didn't download the interview from LHI. The file name will be interview.xml if you are converting a 4.0 Guided Interview. It will be guide.xml if you are trying to upload an A2J Guided Interview created in A2J Author 5.0 or later.

 

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You’ve successfully uploaded and converted your A2J Guided Interview. Now you need to open it and test it thoroughly to ensure that the conversion was done properly and that your Guided Interview is running as expected. Here is a checklist you should run through before you attempt to upload your A2J Guided Interview to

  • Check your logic/conditional statements. Go to the All Logic tab and review all of the conditional statements in your A2J Guided Interview. A2J Author 4.0 was more forgiving of scripting errors and author mistakes. A2J Author 6 is much stricter (because the JavaScript it is now written is requires us to be). There is an FAQ of common logic errors here. You’ll know you have a logic error because the logic box will be red and there will usually be an error message. (*If you hit any snags here, reach out to Jessica [Jessica@cali.org] and she’ll walk you through debugging your logic errors.)
  • Check out the other differences between A2J Author 4 and A2J Author 6 here. 
  • Run through your A2J Guided Interview in Preview Mode. Ensure that you have thoroughly tested all possible branches and options. Once you have completed testing your A2J Guided Interview in A2J Author, you’re ready to move on to test assembling with HotDocs and uploading to LawHelp Interactive. To do that, go to the Publish tab within your interview. You can upload to LHI's production site or their staging site, RebuildQA. You'll need a developer account with LHI to complete the upload process. To read the LHI Contributor Guide, click here (note it's password protected - reach out to LHI if you can't access it.) 
 
 
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