When to use question sets

Questions are best suited to capture information used by underwriting or to qualify risk. Do not use question sets in place of standard data model fields to capture information needed to rate a policy or to pass to other integrated components. The way that PolicyCenter stores and retrieves answers makes question sets unsuitable for rating and integrations. Likewise, question sets are not well suited for capturing information directly related to a particular object, such as a building or a vehicle.

The advantage of question sets is that you can quickly and easily configure them in Product Designer, often with no need to perform user interface configuration in Studio. Questions also provide the product model availability mechanism to control when a question is visible.

The disadvantages of question set concerns their storage and retrieval. To enable question sets to be quickly configured through the product model, their answers are stored in generic database tables and columns. These tables can become large enough to cause performance problems, particularly when many questions are combined with complicated availability logic. Additionally, answer values must be retrieved by question code value, rather than by using a specific type-safe symbol as with other product model patterns. An answer value then must be cast to the correct type, introducing the possibility for errors in any programmatic statements that use the answer.

PolicyCenter provides the following two alternatives to question sets to consider, depending on your data collection needs:

• For data used by a rating engine, modifiers provide many of the same advantages as question sets. However, modifiers are specifically designed for fields that are used in rating algorithms.
• For fields associated with specific objects, such as buildings or vehicles, use standard datamodel fields rather than question sets. Datamodel fields are type-safe and properly normalized. You can design the label for a datamodel field to look the same as a question, so the PolicyCenter user is not aware of a difference.