SharePoint University

Hi I'm currentlyworking on sharepoint and have been given a task to add a rating system functionality to a discussion board that we've been using. I'm really new in Sharepoint 2007 development so I really don't know were to start. Can anybody give me some ideas. I've searched everywhere  for similar functionality but can't seem to find one available.

Hi,

I am currently working on a way to rate items. You will be able to add this rating functionality to your disscussion board. Give me a little more time to finish it.

When it is ready, I will Blog about it on my blog. So visit www.hezser.de/blog from time to time ;-) 

 René
 

Not sure if what you mean by "rating" will be same as me, but here's an idea :
a type of rating we've had to do in discussion boards is for user acceptance testing (UAT) discussions

what I did was create a new board for the user's UAT responses, allowing all to add and view but only change and delete their own

then I added a new field to the discussion board - it may not be obvious at first, I was surprised how many people didn't realize you can do this, but really the board is a list mainly like any other

so I added a field for "pass/fail", each time a user posts a reply to a thread they get their own unique entry to the discussion and each one has its own "pass/fail" field

if you create a new View for your site you can display this custom "rating" field, and even Group on the field, so for example we group by Subject (this keeps all posts within the board together, bcz each threaded discussion has a unique subject, for this case the Subject is the item we are UATing), then by pass/fail, so if you collapse the thread and then click open one level, you see how many passes and how many fails and how many posts total

hope this helps! 

The rating system I'm taling about is similar to comments section in Amazon.com. Basically users can reply to a discussion or thread. Then other users can rate the reply from 1-5 using star images and then you see what is the average rating for that particular reply. Does that make sense.

 I've done it using AJAX (JS calls to MOSS web services) to populate a "total vote count" and "average vote" count in the original discussion item content type, with individual ratings by responders being stored in their own response content type.  Every time someone adds a response (I populate the responder rating va a DHMTL call from a common JavaScript rollover field in the responder form), I recalculate the average ratings and store it in the "average vote" field.  Custom XSL displays the items via star rankings.  I did all this in a normal list that basically pretends it's a discussion list.  This route did have some drawbacks, but the payoff outweighed them.

  Discussion groups are very difficult to customize, and I had to figure this all out myself--there are no tutorials that I was able to find (Summer 2007).  However, I think MS now offers a "ratings" column (I have no link for you, though you should check the MOSS templates, etc at MS).  If you have server access, you might be able to make use of it.  The stuff I posted above did not need rights to the server box, since that's the situation my task entailed

Jim Raley