Prevent data loss in review forms

[justingonder]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Recently a reviewer claimed to have submitted their review form, but the editors saw no form entries from the reviewer. They asked the reviewer to try submitting their review again, which they did (they had to re-do the review from scratch since they had been entering their answers directly in the review form and so had no back-up document). The second time, the editors still did not receive any form entries from the reviewer.

Through testing, we discovered that there were two required fields the reviewer had left blank but, after clicking the "Complete Review" button, the reviewer did not notice the error which should have appeared on the bottom right of their screen. Assuming they were done, they left the system and their entire review was lost in both instances.

Describe the solution you'd like Anything that can be done to secure the invaluable work of reviewers is important. In this case, there is at least one easy fix, and perhaps a few other options to consider.

1. Potential easy fix: The error behavior when a reviewer clicks on "Save Progress and Continue Later" is different than the error behavior when clicking "Complete Review" - and the Save Progress error behavior is much more likely to alert a reviewer to the fact that something has gone wrong and their review has not yet been saved.

The Save Progress error behavior scrolls the view to the field needing attention and places a flag on the field alerting the user to what's wrong.

It would be great if this error behavior occurred when Complete Review is clicked as well. It would also provide more consistency.

2. When either button is clicked, perhaps the system could go ahead and save any available entries, even if there are errors. This would preserve as much data as possible in the event that reviewers overlook a form error.
3. If # 2 isn't viable, perhaps Save buttons could be placed next to each field so reviewers could save their work as they go.
4. Auto-save? #3396

Additional context Some review forms can be quite intricate, and reviewers stand to lose a lot if their data aren't saved properly. They'll also not likely want to review for the journal again if their work is lost.

[justingonder]

some overlap with #3396 Automatically Save Partial Reviews

[mauromsl]

Thanks for the detailed report @justingonder We've discussed this issue and came up with some ideas to help alleviate the teething issues with the reviewers:

• As a reviewer, when I click the Save and Continue button, the form is posted and saved with its current progress (preserving current behaviour)
• As a reviewer, When I click "Complete Review" the browser will flag and scroll to any invalid field entries (e.g. missing required fields) using client side validation and before the form is posted. (basically your first proposal)

Do you think think it would work?

[justingonder]

@mauromsl Am I understanding your first point to mean that clicking Save and Continue saves all valid entries even if there are errors in other fields (because that is not the current behavior)? If so, then I think these both sound like great improvements.

[mauromsl]

@mauromsl Am I understanding your first point to mean that clicking Save and Continue saves all valid entries even if there are errors in other fields (because that is not the current behavior)? If so, then I think these both sound like great improvements.

That's right, I meant to say "current intended behaviour"