NSurvey: Survey Overview

The first thing I noticed in NSurvey was the small dropdown in the admin section listing all available surveys. This would become my starting point for users, a perfect place to choose the survey they want to take.

I tracked this down to the SurveyListControl user control which I inherited to create SurveyListControlOverview. This user control removes the automatic postback when it’s in overview mode and also provides an OverviewSurveyId property to indicate the selected survey. It also displays all surveys, because it had to run in anonymous mode, without users having to log on before being able to answer. A shared password would be provided at the event, giving access to the survey.

After this, the user could select a survey from the dropdown list. The only problem was that the choices were ordered by creation date, which would become a problem in the long run when a lot of surveys would be available. To change this I added a simple ORDER BY Title in the vts_spSurveyGetList stored procedure.

At this point, I had a dropdown list with all surveys listed alphabetically to add to any ASPX page I wanted.

The Microsoft Layout post shows it on the start page.