Ordering of Questions

When questions are added to Isora GRC (regardless of whether you use a CSV file or create them individually), they are added into Isora GRC’s database in alphabetical order, within each category. If you are using numbers to try to control the order of the questions, it doesn’t always work out the way you intend.

Numbering of Questions Leads to Issue With Markdown

Because the text field for a question supports Markdown formatting, if you start a question with a number and a period, this will be interpreted as starting a numbered list. Instead of seeing your questions numbered like 1., 2., 3. etc, you will see each question numbered with 1. To “escape” the special meaning of a number with a period to Markdown, you can precede the period with a backslash character.

For example, instead of:

2. Does the team have a documented change management procedure?

You could use:

2\. Does the team have a documented changed management procedure?

Markdown allows you to specify other formatting options besides numbered lists. For instance, you could include a hyperlink in the text of a question. For more information about Markdown, we suggest visiting the external site https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/ .

Numbering More Than Nine Questions

Because the ordering of questions is alphabetical, rather than numerical, this can lead to issues when you have more than nine questions in a given category. To work around this problem, you may find it helpful to add leading zeroes to the lower digit numbers; depending on the number of questions in the category you can determine how many leading zeroes are needed.

For example, if you have less than 100 questions in a category, you could add a single leading zero to questions 1-9.

Before Leading Zeroes Are Used

1- Do your systems store, process or transmit cardholder data?
11- Does the system use a third party to collect, store or process cardholder data?
12- Are you classified as a service provider? 
2- Are you compliant with ...?
21- Are new hires subjected to a background check?

After Leading Zeroes Are Used

Simply use the same number of digits to represent each number, and you shouldn’t have any problems with ordering.

Adding New Questions In-Between Existing Questions

Unfortunately, if you are using the type of numbering schemes discussed, it won’t be easy to add in new questions in-between existing ones in the list, unless you edit all of the existing ones after it to change their numbers. Depending on the formatting you’re using, you might be able to sneak in additional questions but appending something to the number, like a letter. The resulting ordering of questions will be based on the ordering of the ASCII value of the characters in the text of the question.