Wednesday, August 7, 2013

How to enforce unique answers with SharePoint survey’s Rating-Scale questions?


SharePoint surveys support various types of questions, one of them is the Rating-Scale question type which is used to collect users’ ratings.

Example:
Let’s say we want to get employees’ opinion about the upcoming company event, and learn which activities are most preferred. In this case the following survey might do the work:
 

 
In this case, users may also give different activities the same rating.
For example: in the following survey the user likes "Spa" and "Cooking class" in the same level so he gave them the same rating:


 
However, there are other scenarios which require unique answers, or unique ratings. In these cases we would like to prevent users from giving the same rating to several answers.
The problem is that SharePoint does not support that, so you cannot enforce unique ratings in Rating-scale questions.
 
To answer this business challenge, we at KWizCom have added a feature to KWizCom’s Survey Plus web part, which enables enforcing unique answers in rating-scale questions.
When using this new feature, end-users will not be able to provide the same rating for different options; when an end-user rates an option in the rating-scale question, this rating becomes disabled (grayed) for all other options as you can see in the following screenshot:
 
 
 
 
So, as you can see in this example, after a user rated "Cooking class" as 5 he can rate other options between 1 and 4, but not 5.
You can check-out this new feature by downloading a trail version of the Survey Plus web part, please feel free to give us your feedback!
 
 
 
 

Friday, August 2, 2013

IE10 error on SharePoint 2013 sites “The system cannot find the path specified.”

After upgrading the IE browser to IE10, all SharePoint 2013 sites stopped working.

The /_layouts/15/start.aspx page was stuck on “working on it” forever, with a javascript error:

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Almost every page in SharePoint threw this error. In Chrome and FireFox by the way – it worked perfectly.

A bit of JavaScript debugging revealed that SharePoint is trying to use window.localStorage object, which was the root cause for this error.

While I couldn’t figure out why or how to fix it – I found a simple workaround: disable the IE10 local storage feature (which I believe is a part of the HTML5).

Simply go to internet options –> advanced, scroll down to “Enable DOM Storage” and uncheck it’s checkbox:

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And all done – SharePoint works again, even MDS (or partial page rendering which is how I call it) works!

SharePoint 2013 Error 401 Unauthorized on /_layouts/15/start.aspx

I encountered this error today, along with a log message in the ULS saying: cannot find site lookup info for request uri

When browsing directly to the site home page or any other page it worked perfectly. Just this page /_layouts/15/start.aspx returned access denied error.

I googled googled, and even binged but could not find a solution.

Until it occurred to me – alternate access mappings!!!

It appears I didn’t set the site URL as an alternate access mapping for this web application.

A quick trip to central administration fixed that:

Client on “Configure alternate access mappings”:

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Change to your web application:

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Click “Edit Public URLs”

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And add your new header in any of the text boxes:

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done! now it is working as expected.