Just an hour before letting the employees hit the survey link on our Sharepoint server, the department changed their mind and they doesn’t want the Single Choice for each question Survey I did. They wanted to change the type of the survey from Multiple radio buttons choices for each question(Which returns one Choice) to Scale Survey (GridChoice Survey in Sharepoint terms or Rating Survey) where the vote is of 1 to 5 scale for each point in a question.

Sharepoint does have a Scale Survey, but if you glimps at it you can’t tell who got the best score, which is something they wanted for the “Employee of the month”.

So in the same way I did to read the items of the Choice Survey, I did it again with some modifications. So instead of looking for the “Choice” type, I used “GridChoice”. Also, the value of the response is different. In a GridChoice value you woud see something like:

Co-operation#4#Skills#3#Outgoing#4#Ideas#3#Attendance#2#


This means the employee got a vote of 4 out of 5 for Co-operation,3 for Skills,4 for Outgoing,3 for Ideas and 2 for Attendance.

So now all I had to do is find a way to extract the numbers out of the string and sum up the numbers for each employe. To do that I did the following C# function:


  private int ResponceScore(string expr)
  {
  String[] numbers = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Split(expr, @"[^\d+]");
  int total = 0;
  foreach (String number in numbers)
  {
  if (number != "")
  {
  int num = int.Parse(number);
  total += num;
  }
  }
  return total;
  }


What the funtion does is it recieves the response’s text, use a regular expression to select or extract the numbers in the string, sum up the numbers of the response and send it back to be saved in an array or in a variable (Like adding to a variable for each employee).

So the final code is something like:

foreach (SPListItem item in SurveyList.Items)
  {
  foreach (SPField field in item.Fields)
  {
  if (field.TypeAsString == “GridChoice”)
  {
  if (field.Title.ToString() == “Employee Name”)
  {
  empScore+= ResponceScore(item[field.Title].ToString());
  }
}
}

So that is how I managed to do a web part to show the top scores in a Scale Survey in Sharepoint.

Have fun 😉

Sharepoint Services is awesome new framework from Microsoft. And these days where I work, I mostly do Sharepoint 2007 and MOSS development.

I got this request where they wanted a Survey. Sharepoint does have survey, but it lacks statistics on the survey. In their Survey, the Choices for all the questions are identical. For example voting on “Employee of the Month”. After responding to this survey, they wanted to show the top employee in each Choice. The style of the answers are Choice type, where the user choose one of the option under the name of the employee. For example:
– Emplyee name 1
Choice 1: Co-Operation
Choice 2: Great Example

– Emplyee name 2
Choice 1: Co-Operation
Choice 2: Great Example
.
.
.

So the best solution is to make your Web Part read from that Survey’s items.

And to do that, we just need to loop through the Items of the Survey List, look for the “Choice” type of field in it and read its content (The choosen Choice. Choice 1 or Choice 2 … etc). The title of the field is the question text(Employee name).

So we need two loops one to look for the items, and one to look for items’ fields with the type “Choice” – then its title and content.

This is the code to do the loops and readings:

using (SPSite mySite = SPContext.Current.Web.Site)
{
using (SPWeb myWeb = mySite.OpenWeb())
{
SPList SurveyList = myWeb.Lists["Employee of the month"];
foreach (SPListItem item in SurveyList.Items)
{
foreach (SPField field in item.Fields)
{
if (field.TypeAsString == "Choice")
{
if (item[field.Title].ToString() == "Co-operation")
{
coop += field.Title.ToString() + ",";
}
else if (item[field.Title].ToString() == "Great Example")
{
example += field.Title.ToString() + ",";
}
}
}
}
}
}


Here I used normal string variables to store the names of the employees for each Choice, maybe you would like to use some sort of array instead, but I didn’t since I dont have many questions.

So when the code run, I will have something like the following in my variables:
Co-Operation variable: “Hasan B, Ahmad D, Farah H, Aya K, Hasan B, Amal K, Ahmad D”
Great Example variable: “Tahseen K, Sebhi J, Jafar A, Tahseen K”

Now by counting how many times each name is repeated for each choice, I can get an idea of who got the most votes for each choice.

I used the following C# function to count how many times each phrase or word accured in a string variable:

private string CountWords(string input)
{
char[] delims = new char[] { '.', ',', ';' };
string[] wordlist = input.Split(delims, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
SortedList words = new SortedList();
foreach (string item in wordlist)
{
if (!words.ContainsKey(item))
words.Add(item, 1);
else
words[item]++;
}
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (KeyValuePair kvp in words)
sb.Append(kvp.Key + ": " + kvp.Value + "
");
return sb.ToString();
}


So now from my Web Part I can write:

writer.Write("Co-Operation" + "
" + CountWords(coop) + "
" +
"Great Example" + "
" + CountWords(example))


And the function CountWords will return me the number of times a name accured in that passed string variable which represents the Choice.

For my example the output would look like:

Co-Operation
Hasan B: 2
Ahmad D: 2
Aya K: 1
Amal K: 1
Farah H:1
Great Example
Tahseen K: 2
Jafar A: 1
Sebhi J: 1


This code needs some additions to make it more useful, but I searched on the net, and I didn’t find answer for this, so I thought I would share with you what I got so far. I’m probably going to work more on this.

Hope it helped.