Zodiac.NET 1.1 - Survey Engine Toolkit for ASP.NET

Zodiac.NET is a web based survey engine and form builder toolkit for Microsoft .NET written in pure managed .NET C#. Zodiac.NET combines XML and ASP.NET in one customized, easy to use and integrated component for .NET web solutions. The engine helps .NET developers save the time and effort in creating surveys and custom forms by providing unique features to fit the diversity in project specifications and business needs. Zodiac.NET uses XML in defining the survey details and collecting the responses which add a significant value in terms of integration and custom analysis. The engine also provides a collection of web controls that can be easily embedded in any ASP.NET page with the minimum configuration steps.
Zodiac.NET Survey Engine Toolkit

Features

  • Create questionnaires, surveys, exams and custom forms in your .NET web projects
  • Offers Single Choice Questions, Multiple Choice Questions, Matrix Questions, Text Questions and Essay Questions
  • The ability to group the survey questions in pages and wizard steps
  • AJAX Survey designer web control to build and design the surveys
  • Enforce survey policies and constraints like mandatory/optional questions.
  • Define active start date, end date and survey quota
  • The ability to randomize the question choices
  • Display the question choices in columns and rows
  • Define maximum number of choices for multiple choice questions
  • The ability to use session, cookies or both to ensure users responses integrity
  • Display the user responses and survey statistics
  • Survey definition and user responses are represented as XML files for ease of integration
  • The ability to store the surveys and responses XML definitions in database using Zodiac.NET events and programming APIs
  • Create your custom look and feel for your surveys using custom CSS styles
  • Browsers: IE 6+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari
  • Available for .NET Framework 2.0 or later

New Survey Builder Rich Server Control

Survey Form Builder


 

 

 

Give your website users the ability to design their surveys

The new release of Zodiac.NET has a great feature which will make creating surveys and questionnaires in website much easier.

A new rich web control - Zodiac.NET Survey Builder Web Control - has been added to Zodiac.NET in this release to help your website users to design their own surveys and questionnaires. They can easily edit and update the survey settings, add questions, define survey pages and steps.

The control uses AJAX and client scripting which make updating the survey details quick and simple. The new web control gives a great user experience while using it.

The control look and feel is fully controlled by custom CSS file which can be easily modified and used within your web application.


 Statistics Reporting

Survey Statistics Reports

Zodiac.NET is shipped with two reporting web controls to display the statistics of the surveys and questionnaires. The web controls help you to display the survey responses, the survey general statistics and the survey questions statistics. In addition, you can easily change the style of the controls to match your website theme and style.


Screenshots


Simple, Efficient and Productive

Zodiac.NET provides a collection of web controls to design and view the surveys to the end users. All the surveys and responses will be saved as XML files. This would add a great value for your projects in terms of integration and custom analysis.

This diagram shows how Zodiac.NET handle the surveys data flow and the user interactions.

Zodiac.NET Chart


Supported Question Types

Zodiac.NET provides a diversity of question types to serve the different needs in creating surveys and questionnaires. The following table illustrate the details of the supported question types in Zodiac.NET

single choice question

Single Choice Questions

  • Define question body, remarks and footer text.
  • Unlimited number of text choices.
  • Render the choices as drop down list or radio buttons list.
  • Specify if the question is mandatory or not.
  • Allow the user to enter Other option if his choice is not in the list.
  • Randomize the choices.
multi choice question

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ)

  • Define question body, remarks and footer text.
  • Unlimited number of text choices.
  • Specify if the question is mandatory or not.
  • Allow the user to enter Other option if his choice is not in the list.
  • Randomize the choices.
  • Display the choices in more than one column.
  • Define a maximum allowed number for the user choices.
matrix question

Matrix Questions

  • Define question body, remarks and footer text.
  • Unlimited number of vertical and horizontal criteria/ranking.
  • Specify if the question is mandatory or not.
text question

Text Questions

  • Define question body, remarks and footer text.
  • Specify if the question is mandatory or not.
paragrpah question

Essay Questions

  • Define question body, remarks and footer text.
  • Specify if the question is mandatory or optional.

Zodiac.NET Survey Web Controls

Zodiac.NET is shipped with a collection of web controls which can be easily embedded in your ASP.NET pages. Zodiac.NET Web Controls gives all what you need to create survey/questionnaires based solutions. The web controls will help you design, respond and analyze the surveys.


Sample Code

You just need to include Zodiac.NET assemblies in your project references. To add the Survey Builder Web Control to your page, add the following tag in your ASP.NET web page:

<Zodiac:SurveyBuilderWebControl ID="ucSurveyBuilderWebControl"
                                runat="server"
                                CssClass="bluesky"
                                XmlFilePath="surveys\\sample.xml"
                                PreviewButtonVisible="true" 
                                PreviewButtonText="Preview"
                                PreviewButtonUrl="View.aspx"
                                CancelButtonVisible="true" 
                                CancelButtonUrl="http://www.mentor-logic.com"
                                CancelButtonText="Cancel" />

The sample can be applied for the other web controls like: Survey Viewer, Survey Response List and Survey Report Web Controls. You add each control to your pages by adding the corresponding tag and set the control properties.

In case you don't want to use physical XML files to save the surveys/responses XML and prefer to save the XMLs in a separate database, you can simply set the XML definition to the web controls on the fly as following:

// Set the XML definition of the survey. This XML can be retrieved from the database.
this.ucSurveyBuilderWebControl.Xml = xmlTextFromDatabase;

You are able also to catch the different actions through the fired events from the web controls. For example, you can catch the save event of the Survey Builder Web Control so that you can save the new saved XML definition of the survey on the database.

// Register OnSaveSurvey event
this.ucSurveyBuilderWebControl.OnSaveSurvey += new OnSaveSurvey(ucSurveyBuilderWebControl_OnSaveSurvey);

The same can be applied for the other Zodiac.NET web controls: Survey Viewer, Survey Response List and Survey Report Web Controls.

 


Sample XML Files

Zodiac.NET Surveys and User Responses are both generated as XML. The following are sample XML used and generated by Zodiac.NET:

 


Fully Customized Using CSS

All the web controls are fully customized by CSS style sheets. This means you can change the colors, fonts and size of the web controls elements to fit your site overall style. You can for example modify the CSS files of the survey viewer to fit the mobile screens like PDA, BlackBerry or iPhone.

The package contains 3 sample CSS style sheets so that you can easily modify and use inside your website.

 

CSS Customization

 

Delivering Solutions That Fit

MentorLogic is a leading vendor of components for Microsoft .NET technologies. MentorLogic helps customers build applications with unparalleled richness, responsiveness and interactivity. Created with passion, MentorLogic products help the developers every day to be more productive and deliver reliable applications under budget and on time.

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