Tracked and untracked

In the portal: Journeys and Sequences. Tracking is set on both, and the atom setting is not read.

What it is

tracking is one setting with two values, and it decides whether a piece of content appears on the participant's own Progress page.

It is a property of the content, on the journey, on the sequence and on the atom, rather than of a delivery. So it is decided once, by whoever authors the content, and it applies to every participant who ever receives it. Two programmes inside one tenancy that share a sequence share its tracking setting, so where the two need it differently, give each its own sequence.

It defaults to tracked. Anything created without an explicit answer is tracked, which means it will show. Read the rest of this page before you import anything, so that what reaches Progress is what you chose.

What it looks like

In the portal it is a dropdown with two options, Tracked (Progress) and Untracked (hidden from Progress).

You will find it in three places: the journey settings, the sequence edit form, and, on value-capturing atom types only, the atom's response details.

When you would use it

A worked example. A tenancy runs an eight week programme. Week one opens with a consent form and a set of intake questions, and the weeks after that carry a mood check-in the participant answers every Monday.

The mood check-in should be tracked. It is the thing the participant wants to look back at, and a run of eight Mondays is a chart worth having.

The consent form and the intake questions should be untracked. They are answered once, they never trend, and a participant opening Progress to see how their mood is going does not want "Consent to take part" sitting at the top of the list with a single tick against it.

The rule of thumb: track what a participant would want to look back at, and untrack everything that exists to make the programme work.

The controls

Setting	Where it sits	What it accepts	Default	What changes on screen
tracking	a journey	tracked or untracked	tracked	Whether the journey has a row in the Journeys section of Progress.
tracking	a sequence	tracked or untracked	tracked	Whether answers to it have a row in the Your responses section.
tracking	an atom	tracked or untracked	tracked	Nothing on Progress. See below.

Decide tracking on the journey and on the sequence. Those are the two levels that reach Progress. An atom gets there by being part of a tracked sequence, and the atom's own type decides what it draws. So leave the atom setting at its default and make the decision on the sequence.

It is a word, not a yes or no. The two accepted values are the strings tracked and untracked. true, false, yes and 1 are all rejected, so an import file that carries a boolean here fails rather than guessing. Write the word out in full when you hand-write an import file.

Every level defaults the same way. The database column defaults to tracked. Anything created through the API is set to tracked when the field is left out. Every portal form opens with tracked already selected. So say untracked explicitly wherever you want something kept off Progress.

How it renders

Two lists read the setting, and they read it differently.

The Journeys section shows every tracked journey the participant holds, whatever state it is in: running, finished or cancelled. Tracking is the only gate. Untrack a journey and it disappears from that section for everybody. The row appears the moment somebody assigns the journey, rather than waiting for the participant to start it, so assign a journey when you are ready for the participant to see it.

The Your responses section shows a tracked sequence only once the participant has actually submitted an answer to it. Two conditions, both required. So a tracked sequence that nobody has answered is invisible anyway, and untracking it changes nothing the participant can see yet. A sequence made entirely of reading material has no value to store, so the sequences worth tracking are the ones that capture something. See Charts for which atom types produce a value.

This setting governs Progress and only Progress. Untracking a sequence does not hide it from the home screen. The delivery still appears, the participant still answers it, and the answer is still stored. What changes is the record they can look back at.

A missing value reads as tracked. Where the setting is absent from a record, the platform treats it as tracked rather than as unknown or hidden. That is deliberate: nothing a participant has answered goes missing from their own record by accident, so anything hidden from Progress is hidden because you chose it.

The current value wins over the copy taken at assignment. When somebody is given a journey, a copy of it is pinned to their enrolment. The Progress page reads the live version first and falls back to that pinned copy only when the journey has been removed from the library altogether. So changing tracking reaches people who already hold the content. They do not have to be re-enrolled and nothing has to be re-assigned.

The change lands on the participant's next sync. The app refreshes its copy of the content library on every sync, and the app syncs when somebody opens it. A change made this morning is on the participant's phone the next time they open the app, not immediately.

Set tracking before you enrol anyone

After any import or migration, set tracking on everything you brought in and check that every journey and every sequence has a name, before you enrol anyone. Anything created without a tracking value takes the default and shows on Progress, and a journey or a sequence with no name shows its internal code in its place, deliberately, so that a missing name is visibly wrong rather than quietly plausible.

It is a five minute job before enrolment, and the phone check below is the one that proves it.

How to check what you have

You can check this three ways. The API is the quickest across a whole library.

In the portal. Open the journey settings dialog for each journey, and the edit form for each sequence, and read the dropdown.

Through the API. List your journeys and your sequences and read the tracking field on each row. It is returned on every read of both resources.

On a phone. Sign in as a test participant who holds the content, open Progress, and read the two lists. This is the check worth doing whatever else you did, because it is the only one that shows you what the participant sees.

How to fix it

Set the value to untracked on the journey or the sequence. In the portal that is the dropdown. Through the API it is a patch carrying {"tracking": "untracked"} on the journey or the sequence.

Untracking never deletes anything. The answers stay exactly where they are, the participant simply stops seeing that row on Progress. Track it again later and the whole history reappears. Nothing about this setting is destructive, so it is safe to use it to tidy up a live tenancy.

Worked settings

A programme where the answers are the point. Track the sequences, untrack the journey. The participant sees their own answers over time and is not shown the machinery that delivered them.

A programme where the arc is the point. Track the journey, untrack the sequences. The participant sees where they are up to without a list of every individual form.

A programme with nothing worth trending. Untrack everything, and then hide the Progress tab for the tenancy, so the participant only gets the tabs their programme uses.

Next

One setting, two values, and it is safe to change at any time on a live tenancy.

What the participant sees is the page tracking feeds, section by section, so you can picture what a given choice produces.

Charts is what an answer draws once it is there, which is decided by the atom's type rather than by anything on this page.