Good morning HotDocs Development Community,
There seems to be some misinformation going around regarding the deprecation (or discontinuation) of Multiple Choice components. There is no planned date for retiring Multiple Choice components in HotDocs Author/Advance.
We are still in a phase of the HotDocs timeline I like to call "The Great Migration". We have successfully migrated hundreds of customers over to HotDocs Advance from HotDocs Classic products. The import tool in HotDocs Author, which performs the majority of this heavy lifting is working very well, today, thanks mostly to the HotDocs Development team's excellent attention and clean-up of bugs found from the initial release of HotDocs Author/Advance. Still, most people who have migrated to HotDocs Author retain the use of their Multiple Choice components. At HotDocs we know that Multiple Choice components are pervasive in the majority of Template systems in the world.
I personally use HotDocs Author in my work approximately 70% of the time and HotDocs Developer about 30% of the time these days, and I love the suite of tools that HotDocs Author provides and the continual improvement we see from the HotDocs Development team's agile deployment schedule (which has accelerated over the past few years). Single Select and Multi-Select Components are superior Multiple Choice components in about a dozen ways, and I plan to share with this community examples and tricks I've learned using both authoring tools.
The scope of the change management involved with deprecating a component type from a programming language is something that the HotDocs Product team cares passionately about. There is no way to reasonably deprecate a component type without years of official notice, marketing campaigns, and training to ensure clear business continuity for our stakeholders. To be clear, this change management process has not started yet.
What have we done related to Multiple Choice (MC) components:
They are more difficult to create in HD Author, however you can still import them from developer, duplicate MC Components. HotDocs Author used to have MC components as read only components, however that was a very early version of HotDocs Author and that is no longer the case.
Some new features that previously did not exist in HotDocs Developer are not being built to support MC Components. Authors who want to use some of these new features such as webhooks will need to convert their MC Components.
Because of this, the MC conversion button tool was created (and works way better now, once again thanks to our developer community providing thorough bug reports and the HotDocs Development team prioritizing those fixes). The MC Conversion tool is a button (enabled in HotDocs Author -> Options) found next to the duplicate and rename buttons which opens a simple wizard to take people through the MC Conversion process one component at a time. For the vast majority of components this is very straightforward and produces no errors in existing templates.
If there are any questions please let me know. I have worked with every kind of MC components that could exist in HotDocs Developer and have found parity in HotDocs Author for almost every situation.