Creating Offline Surveys in SharePoint 2010

Using surveys out of the box in SharePoint 2010 give site collection administrators an easy way to gather information from end users, for reporting purposes. Unfortunately, if you need any special features for your surveys, the stock survey functionality quickly falls short. Custom development would then be needed to extend or enhance the functionality needed for surveys. One such scenario requiring custom development is how to extract survey questions for offline use, along with importing survey responses from a Windows forms-based application back into SharePoint. This blog will detail the steps needed to provide this functionality. I am using SharePoint 2010, along with Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition.

Extracting Survey Information

The first step in providing surveys offline is to extract questions from a survey. This can be done using event receivers in SharePoint 2010. Ideally you would create an event receiver that would fire when an item in a list is added, updated, or deleted, so you can capture any changes made to the survey questions. I am checking the BaseType of the list being added, as the event receiver will fire for other list types: Once you’ve determined that the list is a survey, getting all the information from that survey is just a matter of iterating through the list. There is a field property called SchemaXML that holds all the information for each question in the survey (in XML format), so it is a simple matter to create an XML document that represents all the survey questions contained in a survey: A few things to note are that I skip fields in the field collection with the StaticName of “Order” or “MetaInfo”, as those fields do not hold information concerning the survey questions. Additionally, the code snippet is not extracting the information from every question type. This was done for brevity in the article, and it is up to the reader to extend the code to handle all question types. Also note that for lookup question types, I cannot use the SchemaXML information directly, so I am forced to extract the individual attributes I need separately. This is necessary in order to extract all the possible choices that the survey question presents (as the lookup type is a dropdown, radio buttons or check boxes). The GUID of the lookup list is provided, and I am using that to reference the list in SharePoint, in order to iterate through the items in that list, to save them to my XML string. Once the XML string is created for all the survey questions, we need to do something with that information. I am saving this XML as a document in a document library in SharePoint that I’ve created (named SurveyDefinitions), as seen below:

Displaying Surveys Offline

Now that we have our XML file for a survey, we need to use it outside of SharePoint. We can create a Windows Forms-based application to display the survey questions, and allow the user to enter responses for the survey. The main challenge of displaying surveys offline is that we don’t know beforehand what questions are in a survey, so any application will have to render the controls associated with the survey questions dynamically. Here is where the XML file generated earlier comes into play. We can iterate through the XML file to determine what type of survey questions are contained within, and render the proper controls dynamically in our application: Our application also allows the user to save his/her responses for the survey they have selected, and this response information is saved to a different XML file. Please note that for lookup lists, radio buttons and multiple selection checkboxes, there is a specific format that you must follow when saving your responses to the XML file. This is necessary when importing the survey responses back into SharePoint, which I will describe in the next section.

Adding Survey Responses Programmatically

The client object model introduced in SharePoint 2010 can be used to add survey responses to a survey in SharePoint. This is very powerful, as it allows surveys to be rendered offline (using the XML files created earlier), and end users can create responses to a survey while offline, and import these responses back to the SharePoint site when they are online. Our Forms-based application can perform this “uploading” of survey response data for us. Firstly, the application must have connectivity with the SharePoint site. This is a simple matter of detecting the document library we wish to upload our survey response to. Next, to record the response information, our application uploads the survey response file to a document library in SharePoint that has an event receiver listening for items added to it: Please note that for lookups, radio buttons, and multiple-selection checkboxes, the format of the response is important, as that specifies to the survey which selection item the response data corresponds to. The format is: ;#;#;#;#;# If the index number is incorrect, a different response value will be recorded with the survey response, as SharePoint uses that number to determine which selection item to include as the response.

Conclusion

The new client object model for SharePoint 2010 has allowed surveys to be extended to the offline realm, and opens the door for many exciting scenarios for offline application uses with SharePoint 2010. My scenario of offline surveys is just one scenario, and there are numerous enhancements that can be done to extend this scenario even further.