SharePoint 2010 allows for users to rate site content which you can later aggregate and display ratings in search and various other modules. It`s a great new feature and in this article I would like to show you some tips and tricks on how enabling ratings pragmatically in your deployment script for your lists and libraries.
Here is how we`re going to go about it:
1. Create new site of a Blog site template (we can use any template but for consistency of references I`ll use Blog).
2. Using Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2 now), create a simple Empty SharePoint 2010 Solution.
3. Add a new feature to the solution project.
4. Add a feature receiver to your feature and uncomment FeatureActivated section.
5. Paste the code below into your FeatureActivated:
string listName = string.Empty;
string averageRatingId = string.Empty;
string ratingCountId = string.Empty;
try
{
// use any list name here that you want to enable rating on
listName = “Posts”;
// those are reserved column IDs
averageRatingId = “5a14d1ab-1513-48c7-97b3-657a5ba6c742″;
ratingCountId = “b1996002-9167-45e5-a4df-b2c41c6723c7″;
SPList list = ((SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent).Lists[listName];
SPField fieldByField = GetFieldById(new Guid(averageRatingId), list.ParentWeb.AvailableFields);
if (fieldByField != null && !list.Fields.ContainsField(fieldByField.StaticName))
{
list.Fields.AddFieldAsXml(fieldByField.SchemaXml, true, SPAddFieldOptions.AddFieldToDefaultView | SPAddFieldOptions.AddToAllContentTypes);
}
SPField ratingCountField = GetFieldById(new Guid(ratingCountId), list.ParentWeb.AvailableFields);
if (ratingCountField != null && !list.Fields.ContainsField(ratingCountField.StaticName))
{
list.Fields.AddFieldAsXml(ratingCountField.SchemaXml, false, SPAddFieldOptions.AddToAllContentTypes);
}
list.Update();
Repropagate(list);
}
catch { }
Above code creates two fields in the Posts list, you can have any list name you like. Two fields I’m referring to are : Average Rating, and Number of Raters. Those have their corresponding types. Now, you’ll notice I used two helper functions:
1. GetFieldById - which will get a field name by guid passed
2. Repropagate – will propagate rating functionality to list items (otherwise they won’t get a rating stars beside them)
The following code fro those two functions in a helpers region of your code:
#region Helpers
private static void Repropagate(SPList list)
{
SocialRatingManager ratingManager = new SocialRatingManager(SPServiceContext.Current);
string baseUrl = list.ParentWeb.Url;
if (baseUrl.EndsWith(”/”, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
baseUrl = baseUrl.TrimEnd(new char[] { ‘/’ });
}
foreach (SPListItem item in list.Items)
{
string itemUrl = item.Url;
if (itemUrl.StartsWith(”/”, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
itemUrl = itemUrl.TrimStart(new char[] { ‘/’ });
}
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate
{
ratingManager.PropagateRating(new Uri(baseUrl + “/” + itemUrl));
});
}
}
private static SPField GetFieldById(Guid id, SPFieldCollection fieldArray)
{
try
{
return fieldArray[id];
}
catch
{
return null;
}
}
#endregion
Note: You will need to add using Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData; to your feature. Thisusing statement will require you to add the following assembly:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.dll
This assembly depends on the correct version of Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 DLL installed. You can reference the DLL directly in your solution by extracting it from you GAC. The assembly is called System.Web.DataVisualization
The last part is to handle the feature being deactivated; all we need to do in this case is delete two column we have added. We can reuse the same code to get a hold of the list but instead of adding item we delete them:
if (fieldByField != null && list.Fields.ContainsField(fieldByField.StaticName))
{
list.Fields.Delete(fieldByField.StaticName);
}
Now when you deploy your solution and the feature is installed and activated, ratings will be enabled on the Posts list in our case. Note that we executed AddFieldToDefaultViewin our FeatureActivated meaning that our rating stars will be displayed only on taht view. If you want them to appear on any other view – you can just add the Rating (0-5) column to the view. Rating column is almost like any other column and you can sort and filter by it.
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy, Microsoft SharePoint MVP
Blog: www.sharemuch.com
