Mechanical Turk: Categorization project via Request UI diffictulties - mechanicalturk

I am a newbie in MTurk, and I am trying to create a very simple Categorization Project via their Requester UI (rather then the API).
Each batch I use has 10 items (question and possible answer). I have searched their documentation and forums with not help and so I have several questions:
When i use their Standard Categorization template, I have no option for modifying the HTML and layout (as shown for "Tagging of an image" project). the only formatting options are for the categories, instructions and includes/excludes. Is there a way to edit the HTML of the standard template they provide?
In the Standard Categorization template, while my input data file (csv file) contains 10 items, only 5 are shown (tried with 6, still only 5 are displayed in the preview). Is there a way to change this limitation?
When I try to use the "Create HITs Individually" (rather than the standard template, as explained above), I have the "Design Layout" options, but I cannot find a way to make the questions in the "form" required (which is possible via the API). Is there a way to achieve this?

If you stick to the standard project templates, you can't modify them. That's the reason to create HITs individually (through the RUI or via the API).
You'll have to show us your CSV file, because it's not really clear from your description what the issues could be.
Your third question is unclear, but basically for creating HITs individually, you simply do standard HTML markup and put in ${variablename} placeholders wherever you want one of your CSV upload variables to be placed.
If your project is at all large, I would definitely recommend going through the API. It's simply much more flexible than the RUI for creating any kind of customized design.

Related

QNAmaker: How to enable context-only for subquestions?

I have a document pdf or docx (only accepted formats for multiturn), this contains alot of subheadings which translate to follow up prompts. This all works fine! But I would like to enable context-only for all of my prompts, because the answers are not relevant out of context.
Can I denote this in my document itself? There are way too many too manually check the button.
I could write a script that changes the contextOnly to true on the exported tsv, but this seems like it is a silly workaround.
There does not seem to be any way to indicate whether a question is context-only through the document extraction process, so you will need to automate this with a script. If you don't want to modify the TSV directly, you can use the QnA REST API. You can also access this API through the Bot Framework CLI but I don't know if that makes anything more convenient for you.

Multiple Language Support in WP8 app

For my WP8 app i want to provide support for several languages. For this I'm currently using *.resw files in order to store language specific text for needed xaml elements. I also defined the default language (en-US) within the *.appxmanifest.
Regarding my project's file organization, I created several language files used for different groups of information, e.g. button context ("AppBarButtons.resw") or pivot header ("PivotHeader.resw").
But now I'm not quite sure if this is the best solution. What would be if there are elements on different pages, all with the same x:Uid property?
So my question is, should i stick to this solution or shall I create a language file for each page individually, and how can I let the user choose a specific language (only if available for this app of course) programmatically?
Create only one .resw file per language. Creating one per form is going to become a very difficult solution to maintain over time, especially if you share terms between forms. Also use the x:Uid notation in the xaml when possible this makes life so much easier. I found the following video from Microsoft on languages in windows phone to be quite helpful ...
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Windows-Phone-8-1/08
If wanting to use the same translations such as in the app bar save button for example: the XAML would look like as follows...
<AppBarButton x:Uid="AppBarSave" Label="" Icon="Save" Click="AppBarButtonSave_Click"/>
The resource file would like like the following:

Custom GUI template script creator

My app currently reads a script containing instructions on what the app should do next. Think of it this way ---> My app is like an orchestra, and when it is passed sheet music (the script), it knows what to do. The sheet defines what different parts of the orchestra do at different times.
Currently, writing the script by hand is tedious. I want to be able to define chunks, which I can drag and drop from my gui to the script. I was wondering if there already is tools which let you do something like this, or if I should write my own tool.
Basically, when I click on something in the gui, it should insert a template into my plist, which I can tweak.
EDIT: It looks like the ability to create "Property list Structure Definitions" is what I am after. I have tried searching the apple site, but I can't find any documentation.
Two things come to mind:
You don't mention what format the input is in, nor what you want the GUI tool to do beyond letting you "drag chunks". But if you can define your format into an XML schema, then you can use any number of XML authoring tools that customize their interface based on schema. Also gives you the ability to make it easy to let the UI enter parameters/customization, which your script language likely has. Final bonus: you might be able to convert script directly into a plist with a simple XSLT file.
Check out Briefs, which is a prototyping application for iOS apps that has a similar architecture.

Form development optimization

Like many web developers I do forms all the time. I found myself doing the same all the time: placing input fields, assigning a name to each, ajax the form, then create the php which involves to assign a $php var to each $_REQUEST['var'], escape and validate data, build the html and emailing the results...
So I find that 70% of the work I repetitive but I just can't duplicate a page and change the fields. I end up wasting more time reformatting, deleting and adding different fields than creating from scratch.
I started planing to program a "list of IDs to html+php" converter in which I'd input all the IDs and this would output the basic html and php. Then I thought: there's got to be thousands of developers that go through this, I'd be reinventing the wheel. So this is my question, I'm trying to find that wheel that somebody must have invented already.
I found this: http://www.trirand.com/blog/jqform/ which does more or less what I'm looking for but it's an expensive solution and it has too much functionality for what I'd be using it.
Which tools do you use to optimize repetitive task about html and php?
Creating forms using plain HTML is cumbersome and time consuming. The task will be much simpler if you use an open source form library. I use Zend_Forms extensively. You could also look into the one provided by EZ Components
These form libraries allow you to specify various form elements, validators for each element and data filters (string tags, lowercasing etc...). Once you have specified these the library automatically handles the rendering of forms and further if there are errors it will renders the errors as well. Usually these libraries render the forms with certain predefined mark-up (HTML) but it's configurable as well.
If you start using one of these libraries you would save a lot of time while creating forms. In-fact I would suggest you to use a framework such as Zend or Symfony for your projects.

Generate PDF from structured data

I want to be able to generate a highly graphical (with lots of text content as well) PDF file from data that I might have in a database or xml or any other structured form.
Currently our graphic designer creates these PDF files in Photoshop manually after getting the content as a MS Word Document. But usually, there are more than 20 revisions of the content; small changes here and there, spelling corrections, etc.
The 2 disadvantages are:
1) The graphic designer's time is unnecessarily occupied. The first version is the only one he/she should have to work on.
2) The PDF file becomes the document which now has the final revised content, and the initial content is out of sync with it. So if the initial content needs to be somewhere else (like on a website), we need to recreate it from the PDF file.
Generating the PDF file will help me solve both these problems. Perhaps some way in which the graphic designer creates a "Template" and then puts in tags/holders and maps these tags/holders to the relevant data.
Thanks :-)
There are some tools out there for doing this. XSL-FO is useful. Here is a tutorial for creating a pdf from xml (or xhtml) with cocoon. Also see Apache FOP.
You could format your SQL data as XML and still use the same templates this way.
I use the ReportLab python library for this. It could perhaps solve your problem, but you will need to do some work...
In the past I have written scripts that spit out LaTeX then used texi2pdf to solve this kind of problem.
Take a look at iReport and JasperReports at http://jasperforge.org.
iReport lets you design reports, and then you can either programatically fill it with the JasperReports library (Java), or just use iReport to manually create the report.
I have only used it for tabular data, but I don't think there would be any problem for other types of documents.
You could create a form and populate the entries programmatically using a pdf library like iText (Java).
You could look at doing the workflow in PostScript which is plain text that you can easily compose from fragments. Then you can use any free tool to convert to PDF.
Take a look at Prince XML. This tool allows to generate PDF based on XML or HTML and CSS.
A possible way is to use a template engine, like FreeMarker or StringTemplate: these are often used to generate HTML, but they are flexible enough to output any format, actually.
The problem is to make a PDF template, I suppose. Perhaps you can take a sample output and edit it to replace data with placeholders to be filled by the template engine. Might not be trivial!
Sounds like a job that SQL Server Reporting Services can handle quite easily.
Reporting Services allows you to query the data, define the layout, and export to PDF without any intervention. The PDF output can be distributed via email, stored on a file share, and accessed via a page on the report server.
It can handle XML data sources too.
Another approach to generating a PDF file from data is to use prawn, which is based on ruby. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much functionality is included in prawn. It may take some investment up front but this approach will give you a lot of flexibility.
You can combine CSStoXSLFO with XEP from RenderX for high quality output. With this solution you can merge XML data into an XHTML template, which is decorated with CSS. It can also generate charts with the fantastic JFreeChart library. CSS3 page media features are supported.