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Project Description

This project allows authenticated users to rate documents, list items, issue items, calendar items. It follows the following rules

- Each AUTHENTICATED user can rate documents & items one or more times but only 1 vote per person will be kept for a given document/item. So, if a person has already voted, his/her current vote will replace the previous one.

- All the votes from all users for a given document/item allow the system to compute an average for that document

- The voting results are stored in a read-only custom field attached to a content type and represented by a five-stars picture. The number of votes is displayed when passing the mouse over the stars.

- A vote report is available to every authenticated user so that he can have a look at the current votes/coments for a given document/item

- A list manager can see a full report of all the votes done against a specific list

- A site owner can see a full report including all the votes of all the lists/doc libs for a given web site

- Standard SharePoint views can be applied on the doc lib to build views such as "top 5 rated documents etc..."

The project delivers 5 site collection content types that can be respectively associated to :

ct.JPG

- Document libraries
- Issue lists
- Calendar lists
- Custom lists
- Link lists

To associate a content type to a list, you need to go to its advanced settings => allow management of content types. Then, back to the list settings, you click on add from existing site content types => pick up the CT corresponding to the current list

Once done, you'll have two new fields associated to your list "Voting Results" and "Voting Comments". They're both read-only custom fields.

"Voting Results" stores the vote average computed from all the votes.
"Voting Comments" is a link to the vote history

To see those fields, you need to check them in the default view associated to your list

You end-up with something like this:

novote.JPG

You can vote either by clicking on "Vote" or on the stars, either on picking up the "Vote" action from the ECB

vote.JPG

You'll be redirected to the voting page where you can pick up a rating value and leave a comment

votepage.JPG

Once done, you get the item rendered as follows:

votedone.JPG

Remember that only 1 vote per user is kept in the history. The number of stars will vary according to the vote average.

Now, if you click on "View Comments" or "View Vote Reports" from the ECB, you get the vote history for a given document/item

votehistory.JPG

A list manager can view a full report on the list showing all the ratings for all the documents/items of the given list. You can see that by going to list settings

listsettings.JPG
which shows you the list report
listreport.JPG

Eventually, a site owner can also visualize a report showing all the ratings for the entire web site
sitesettings.JPG
which shows this report
webreport.JPG

Using SharePoint Views

You can use standard SharePoint views to encapsulate views such as "Top Rated Items", "Non-rated items" etc...just by applying filtering, sorting on the "Vote Results" column. Here are two examples

Top-Rated => create a view => descending sort on Vote Results
toprated.JPG

Non-Rated => create a view => filter (Vote Results Eq <leave it blank>)

nonrated.JPG


Tips

You can create a calculated column to get the number of votes for a given document/item so that you can perform sorts, filtering etc...using views

=IF([Vote Results]<>"",TRIM(MID([Vote Results],5,(FIND("vote(s)",[Vote Results])-5))),0)

and make sure you define your computed column as a number

When you've done that, you can for instance create a view "Most rated documents"

=> create a view => descending sort on you computed column

Scalability

The system should be quite scalable because the vote history is stored within each rated item and not centrally. It means that the load is spread over the entire farm!

A few tests with a high number of votes (30 000 for only 1 doc) didn't reveal any performance trouble, instability...

Improvements

Feel free to do whatever you want with that solution! A major improvement that could be done is localizing it. Indeed, the system has been designed in English.


Last edited Jul 24 at 8:07 AM  by StephaneEyskens, version 27
Comments
Also available: 4 reviews for current release.

digivix wrote  Jun 24 at 7:14 PM  
I have downloaded and installed this project. I am able to add the content type to the doc library but do not see any stars or the Vote or View Vote Report items that should have been added to the menu. Can you take a minute and put together a step by step? I'm using WSS 3.0, maybe that is the issue? Thanks good work as far as I can tell :)

Kaydub wrote  Jul 17 at 6:43 PM  
Does this product work for pages libraries? For example could we add it to a custom content type for news pages?
Thanks!

StephaneEyskens wrote  Jul 18 at 11:02 PM  
Hi,

I'll answer to both comments :).

Digivix : you should see the comments & voting results fields but of course you need to add them to the view associated to your doc lib....

Kaydub : Unfortunately, it's not (yet) usable with pages because their content types is different.

kavipriyaa wrote  Jul 24 at 1:45 PM  
Hi,
This works fine in my development environment but not in production. It has successfully installed but i don't see any custom content type and reports. My production server is in NLB where as dev is stand alone. But is successfully installed in all web servers. can you please suggest what might be the issue?
Thanks,
Kavi...

StephaneEyskens wrote  Jul 25 at 10:11 AM  
Hi,

It probably means that the deployment of the solution didn't complete successfully for some reason. You should go to the central administration in the solution store and have a look at the status of "HightLight.wsp"

If it's in error, have a look at the error and try to redeploy-it.

What you should also take care of, is your configuration. If you deploy a solution, SharePoint tries to deploy it on all the front-ends, if one of the front-end doesn't answer, the solution can be stuck and remain in an error state.

Otherwise, things to check on the front-ends are :

=> is the feature directory "Document Rating" created?
=> If yes, do you find all the xml files which are "contenttypes.xml", "feature.xml", "customactions.xml" and "fields.xml"
=> You should also find the file "FLDTYPES_highlight.xml" in the XML folder of the TEMPLATE folder
=> and eventually, you should find the pages "ItemRating.aspx","ItemReport.aspx","ListRatingReport.aspx" and "WebRatingReport.aspx" in the folder LAYOUTS

and this, on all the front-ends.

Don't forget that to benefit from the content types, you need to activate the feature "
Document Rating" that's available in the site collection features.

Best Regards

fersami wrote  Jul 25 at 5:10 PM  
Hi,

Is it possible to view comment on a document without logging in ?

Thank you,
Sam

StephaneEyskens wrote  Aug 6 at 8:06 AM  
Hi,

So far no but you're right, it should be allowed! I'll change that as soon as I can :)

tredkar wrote  Aug 8 at 3:59 AM  
I have everything installed. I see the content types. But when I ad the content types to a list, I neither see the Vote ECB Menu or the Vote Link to Vote. The column is blank.

tredkar wrote  Aug 8 at 4:07 AM  
I checked all the files in the FEATURES, XML and LAYOUTS folders and they are fine. But still I don't see the Vote Link and the ECB Vote Menu Option

tredkar wrote  Aug 8 at 4:28 AM  
Ok got it. I had to change the content type to the rating CT explicitly.

epaquet wrote  Aug 22 at 5:25 PM  
Hi,
I do not see the new content type on the content type galery.

I check the installation like it's write in the July 25 reply. Everything is present. The feature is activated.

I have a french version of MOSS 2007. Can it be the problem?

What file contain the code to add the Content type ?

Thank you

Erik

fouladvand wrote  Aug 23 at 2:40 PM  
Hi ;
i downloaded the release and installed it
solution is fully deployed
i can see content type
i added it to my library list
but there is not any VOTE in my menu bar :(:(
i am using MOSS2007
i activated solution too but i still cant voting anything .
thanks

amitkumarajain wrote  Aug 31 at 4:57 PM  
Gr8 tool. i have 2 questions
1) Does not seem to work with items which were loaded before the package was installed
2) On the document library, I get 2 options a) Document b) document Rating. with the 2nd option, a word document opens, However on other links that I have on my sharepoint I get the upload link option. Is there some thing in setting that I need to do to get the upload option rather than the word application opening.

amitkumarajain wrote  Aug 31 at 5:01 PM  
One more issue I encountered. When I use the upload options or the multiple upload options which are part of sharepoint default, I am not able to see the vote options.

amitkumarajain wrote  Aug 31 at 5:08 PM  
I additionally get only 1 content type - Document Rating. Do not get the other 4 you mentioned above. Additionally the vote link option under the column vote results does not appear.

amitkumarajain wrote  Aug 31 at 5:48 PM  
1) I was able to change the content type and the default options :). even the upload option worked. Just changing the default content type order did the trick :). However when I use the content type as rating, i was not able to see the option for adding keywords etc. Is there a setting change needed for this.

JustynaU wrote  Sep 15 at 5:29 PM  
I also had some problem with proper deployment but already solved all my issues so I may address some of your problems:
1. After standard solution deployment I couldn't see new content types, although I could find new feature folder on the server with all required files. So I activated feature explicitly using:
stsadm -o activatefeature -id [feature_ID] -url http://server -force
2. Then I could see new content types so I added them to my library. I also enabled "View Comments" and "Vote Results" on my lib view, but I couldn't see any links to be able to vote or view comments. This was because the documents uploaded to library were still "Document" not "Document Rating". I had to edit properties of each document and change its content type from "Document" to "Document Rating". After that I could see proper links and was able to vote.
3. When I changed content type, I went to lib settings and removed "Document" content type from lib, so by default everything I uploaded from now was only Document Rating.

Now all warks great for me and it's really useful.

Updating...