Request

When saving or exporting a data file as a QDat, preserve all metadata changes made in the source document, including variable set names, question labels, value labels, groupings, constructed variables, and any manual relabelling applied in the Data Sets tree.

Current behaviour

When a QDat is created from a data preparation document and then used in a reporting document, some metadata changes may not be carried over as users expect. This means users may have to repeat metadata cleanup and relabelling work in both the data preparation and reporting documents.

Desired behaviour

The QDat should retain the cleaned and finalized metadata from the source document at the point of saving. When the QDat is loaded into another document, the reporting document should reflect the same variable labels, variable set names, groupings, and constructed variable structure that existed in the data preparation document.

Customer impact

This would reduce duplicate work in workflows where one document is used for data preparation and another for reporting. It would also make tracker updates more efficient, as users would not need to manually relabel or regroup variable sets in multiple documents each wave.

Use case

A customer prepares and cleans their data in a dedicated data preparation document, then saves the output as a QDat for use in a separate reporting document. They need the reporting document to inherit the cleaned metadata from the data preparation document, so the same relabelling and grouping work does not need to be repeated.