Below are some common areas of misconfiguration for checklists and their possible solutions.

If you run into an issue that is not covered in this documentation, please pose your question in the Community.

A record is missing a checklist item

First locate the rule that should have added the checklist item. Is it a rule that adds a checklist group or a rule that adds an individual item? Be sure to name your checklist rules in a consistent way that makes this easy to determine quickly, for example “Add Checklist Group Group Name” or “Add Checklist item Item Name.”

If the item was added by a group rule, does the record still qualify for the rule criteria? Checklist rules that add groups behave dynamically. If a record no longer meets the filter criteria for the rule, the group items will not stay on the record.

If the item was added by a rule that adds individual items, use check logic to confirm that the record qualified for this rule. If so, is there a different rule that removes the item for qualifying students? Does the record meet the criteria for this rule?

A checklist item was removed from a checklist group, but still displays on the applicant checklist

Typically, it is not adviseable to adjust checklist groups or rules while accepting applications. If it is necessary to do so, note that removing individual checklist items from a checklist group in the Checklists database tool will not retroactively remove those items from records that qualify for the rules to add that group. All items in a checklist group will disappear from the applicant record if the applicant ceases to qualify for the checklist group rule, but the rule does not have the ability to remove individual items already on applicant checklists by cross-referencing with the group’s current contents.

To remove an individual item or group of items into a new checklist group will be to ensure that those items are in a group that the applicant record does not qualify for. If the aim of removing the item from the group was to remove this requirement from all records, create a temporary checklist group with a rule that no record will qualify for. The rule can be inactivated once it is clear that the item has been removed from the checklist, while the rest of the items in the original checklist group remain.

Checklist rules are not adding checklist items or marking items as fulfilled

Is the record in an Active Period? Checklist rules only run on records in an Active Period. Checklist rules will run on Inactive Rounds as long as the Round is in an Active Period.

Are your Checklist rules in an Exclusivity Group? It is generally best practice to not place Checklist Rules in Exclusivity Groups, except for extremely complex and rare scenarios. Exclusivity Groups evaluate the record for each rule in order and take action on the highest priority rule where the record meets the criteria. The record will not be evaluated for lower priority rules and no action will occur.

Duplicated checklist items

If more than one rule adds the same checklist item, duplicate checklist items will be added to a record. It is helpful to have a naming convention for all checklist rules to quickly discern which item or group the checklist rule adds or marks as fulfilled.

Duplicated school-scoped checklist items

See above item; if an applicant qualifies for multiple rules to assign school-scoped checklist items, duplicate will be added to the record. Also confirm that auto-generated transcript checklist item behavior is disabled. A script will need to be run to remove auto-generated checklist items from records. See Database Cleanup Tools.

Incorrect Checklist item on a record

Only Checklist items added by a group and School-Scoped Checklist items behave dynamically. In other words, if a checklist item is added by a Group and a record no longer meets the criteria for the rule, the checklist item will be removed from the record when the rules are evaluated. If a checklist item is added by a rule configured to add only the checklist item, that item will remain on the record until it is manually removed or removed by another rule. For more information about this behavior, see  'Checklist Items and Groups'.

The Action section of a rule to add a checklist group

The action section of a rule to add an individual item

Students moving ahead without a completed checklist

Does the record have any checklist items? If the record does not qualify for any Checklist rules and no checklist items are added, the checklist is considered complete.

If the record does have checklist items, but the necessary items have not been received, confirm that any Application Status rules are configured correctly by using the Check Logic feature to ensure the record qualifies for the rule. Some Application Status rules rely on the Required for Reading setting of a checklist. When adding checklist filters to Application Status rules it is necessary to join to Checklists in a subquery filter, but an additional join to Checklist Lookup to access checklist configuration filters like the Required for Reading setting is also needed. In an Awaiting Materials rule, for example, your subquery filter might look like this:

Querying on Checklists

The relationship of Application to Checklist is one to many. A single applicant may have multiple checklist items. When querying for Checklist, making a join at the base of the query to Checklists will flatten that join to one to one and return results for only 1 checklist item. Making a Subquery Filter or Export with a join to Checklists will allow Slate to search through all checklist items associated with an application.